Part 65 (1/2)

TIM. Surly sir, your design?

HAX. To ruin your design, illicentiate playwright. Down with your bills, sir.

TIM. Your bill cannot do it, sir.

HAX. But my commission shall, sir. Can you read, sir?

TIM. Yes, sir, and write too, else were I not fit for this employment.

[_He reads the paper._

TRIL. With what a scurvy, screwed look the myrmidon eyes him! He will surely bastinado our comedian out of his laureate periwig.

Hold him tug, poet, or thou runs thy poetical pinnace on a desperate shelf!

TIM. What bugbear has your terrible blades.h.i.+p brought us here? A mandate from one of our own society to blanch the credit of our comedy! You're in a wrong box, sir; this will not do't.

HAX. You dare not disobey it!

TIM. Dare not! A word of high affront to a professed Parna.s.sian!

I dare exchange in pen with you and your penurious poetaster's pike; and if your valour or his swell to that height or heat as it will admit no other cooler but a downright scuffle, let wit perish and fall a-wool-gathering, if with a cheerful brow I leave not the precious rills of Hippocrene, and wing my course for Campus Martius.

HAX. 'Slid, this Musaeus is a Martialist; and if I had not held him a feverish white-livered staniel,[108] that would never have encountered any but the Seven Sisters, that knight of the sun[109] who employed me should have done his errand himself.

Well, I would I were out of his clutches! The only way, then, is to put on a clear face, lest I bring a storm upon myself.

[_Aside._] Virtuous sir, what answer will your ingenuity be pleased to return by your most humble and obsequious va.s.sal?

TIM. Ho! sir, are you there with you[r] bears? How this Gargantua's spirit begins to thaw! Sirrah, you punto[110] of valour!

HAX. I have, indeed, puissant sir, been in my time rallied amongst those blades; but it has been my scorn of late to engage my tuck upon unjust grounds.

TIM. Tucca, thy valour is infinitely beholden to thy discretion.

But, pray thee, resolve me: art thou made known to the purport of thine errand?

HAX. In part I am.

TIM. And partly I will tell thee; this squirt-squib wherewith that pragmatical monopolist Nasutius Neapolita.n.u.s has here employed thee to obstruct our action shall be received and returned with as much scorn as it was sent us with spiteful impudence! Let him come if he like; he may trouble himself and his own impoverished patience, but we shall slight him on our stage, and tax him of frontless insolence.

HAX. You shall do well, sir.

TIM. Well or ill, sir, we will do it. Pray, tell me, brave spark, what Archias may this be who takes thus upon him to excise the revenues of our theatral pleasure to his purse? Be his monopolising brains of such extent as they have power to engross all inventions to his coffer, all our stage-action to his exchequer?

HAX. I would be loth to praise him too much, because your transcendent self prize[s] him so little; but his travels have highly improved his expression.

TIM. We know it, don, and he knows it too, to his advantage. But no man knows the issue of his travel better than Timon. It is true, he addressed his course for Malagasco; but for what end?--to learn hard words, school himself in the Utopian tongue; and, to close up all, he sticked not, Xerxes-like, to deface bridges in the ruins whereof, poor gentleman, he irreparably suffered.

HAX. To my knowledge, he speaks no more than authentic truth; for I myself, in my own proper person, got a snap by a Neapolitan ferret at the very same time; ever since which hot ?tnean service my legs have been taught to pace iambics, and jadishly to interfere upon any condition.

[_Aside._

TIM. Thus much for your despatch. Only this: be it your civility, valiant don, to present my service to his naked savages, monkeys, baboons, and marmosets, advising, withal, your master of the bear-yard, that he henceforth content his hydroptic thoughts with his own box-holders; and, lest he lose by his outlandish properties, be it his care to pick out some doxies of his own, lest those she-sharks whom he has employed upon that trading occasion abuse his confidence.