’A rainbow in the morning 407 Is the shepherd’s warning;’

and the flocks of which you are the pastor are scattered among the mountain-tops, where every drop of water is a flake of snow, and the breath of May pierces like a January blast. 411

KING: 
The sheep have mistaken the wolf for their shepherd, my poor boy; and
the shepherd, the wolves for their watchdogs.

QUEEN: 
But the rainbow was a good sign, Archy:  it says that the waters of the
deluge are gone, and can return no more.

ARCHY:  Ay, the salt-water one:  but that of tears and blood must yet come down, and that of fire follow, if there be any truth in lies.—­The rainbow hung over the city with all its shops,...and churches, from north to south, like a bridge of congregated lightning pieced by the masonry of heaven—­like a balance in which the angel that distributes the coming hour was weighing that heavy one whose poise is now felt in the lightest hearts, before it bows the proudest heads under the meanest feet. 424

QUEEN: 
Who taught you this trash, sirrah?

ARCHY:  A torn leaf out of an old book trampled in the dirt.—­But for the rainbow.  It moved as the sun moved, and...until the top of the Tower...of a cloud through its left-hand tip, and Lambeth Palace look as dark as a rock before the other.  Methought I saw a crown figured upon one tip, and a mitre on the other.  So, as I had heard treasures were found where the rainbow quenches its points upon the earth, I set off, and at the Tower—­ But I shall not tell your Majesty what I found close to the closet-window on which the rainbow had glimmered.

KING: 
Speak:  I will make my Fool my conscience. 435

ARCHY:  Then conscience is a fool.—­I saw there a cat caught in a rat-trap.  I heard the rats squeak behind the wainscots:  it seemed to me that the very mice were consulting on the manner of her death.

QUEEN: 
Archy is shrewd and bitter.

ARCHY:  Like the season, 440 So blow the winds.—­But at the other end of the rainbow, where the gray rain was tempered along the grass and leaves by a tender interfusion of violet and gold in the meadows beyond Lambeth, what think you that I found instead of a mitre?

KING: 
Vane’s wits perhaps. 445

ARCHY:  Something as vain.  I saw a gross vapour hovering in a stinking ditch over the carcass of a dead ass, some rotten rags, and broken dishes—­the wrecks of what once administered to the stuffing-out and the ornament of a worm of worms.  His Grace of Canterbury expects to enter the New Jerusalem some Palm Sunday in triumph on the ghost of this ass. 451