Part 6 (1/2)

_Nath_. I praise G.o.d for you, Sir: your _reasons_ at dinner have been _sharp and sententious_; pleasant without scurrility, witty without affection, audacious without impudency, learned without opinion, and strange without heresy. I did converse this _quondam_ day with a companion of the king's, who is int.i.tuled, nominated, or called Don Adriano de Armado.

_Hol_. _Novi hominem tanquam te_. His manner is lofty, his discourse peremptory, his tongue filed, his eye ambitious, and his general behaviour, vain, ridiculous and thrasonical. He is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, and, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may call it.

_Nath_. A most singular and choice epithet! [Takes out his table-book.]

_Hol_. _He draweth out the thread of his verbosity_ finer than the _staple of his argument_, ['More matter with less art,' says the queen in Hamlet], I abhor such _fantastical phantasms_, such insociable and _point device_ companions, such rackers of orthography, as to speak doubt _fine_ when _he should say doubt_, etc. This is abhominable which he would call abominable; it insinuateth me of insanie; _Ne intelligis, domine_? to make frantic, lunatic.

_Nath_. _Lans deo bone intelligo_.

_Hol_. _Bone--bone for bene_: _Priscian, a little scratched 'twill serve_. [This was never meant to be printed of course; all this is understood to have been prepared only for a performance in 'a booth.']

_Enter_ Armado, etc.

_Nath. Videsne quis venit?_

_Ho. Video et gaudeo._

_Arm._ Chirra!

_Hol. Quare_ Chirra not Sirrah!

But the first appearance of these two _book-men_, as _Dull_ takes leave them to call them in this scene, is not less to the purpose.

They come in with Antony Dull, who serves as a foil to their learning; from the moment that they open their lips they speak 'in character,'

and they do not proceed far before they give us some hints of the author's purpose.

_Nath_. Very _reverent sport_ truly, and done _in the testimony of a good conscience_.

_Hol_. The deer was, as you know, in _sanguis_, ripe as a pomewater, who _now hangeth like a jewel in the ear of Coelo_, the sky, the welkin, the heaven, and _anon falleth like a crab on the face of terra_--the soil, the land, the earth. [A-side glance at the heights and depths of the incongruities which are the subject here.]

_Nath_. Truly, Master Holofernes, the epithets are sweetly varied, like a scholar at the least, but, etc.....

_Hol_. Most _barbarous_ intimation! [referring to Antony Dull, who has been trying to understand this learned language, and apply it to the subject of conversation, but who fails in the attempt, very much to the amus.e.m.e.nt and self-congratulation of these scholars]. Yet a _kind_ of _insinuation_, as it were, _in via, in way of explication_ [a style much in use in this school], _facere_, as it were, replication, or rather _ostentare_, to show, as it were, _his inclination_, after his undressed, unpolished, uneducated, unpruned, untrained, or rather unlettered, or ratherest unconfirmed fas.h.i.+on,--to insert again my _haud credo_ for a deer.... Twice sod simplicity, _bis coctus!_ Oh _thou monster ignorance_, how deformed dost thou look!

_Nath._ [explaining] Sir, _he hath never fed of the dainties bred in a book_; he hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink; _his intellect_ is not replenished; he is only an animal--only sensible in the duller parts;

And such _barren_ plants are set before us that we thankful should be, (Which we of taste and feeling are) for those parts that do fructify in us more than he.

For _as it would ill become me_ to be vain, indiscreet, or a fool, So were there _a patch set on learning_ to see HIM in a _school_. [That would be a new 'school,' a new 'learning,' patching the 'defect' (as it would be called elsewhere) in the old.]

_Dull_. You two are book-men. Can you tell me by your wit, etc.

_Nath_. A rare talent.

_Dull_. If a talent be a claw, look how he claws him with a talent.

_Hol_. This is a gift that I have; simple, simple; a foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions: But the gift is good in those in whom it is acute, and I am thankful for it.

_Nath_. Sir, I praise the Lord for you, and so may my paris.h.i.+oners; for their sons are well tutored by you, and their daughters profit very greatly under you; you are a good member of the COMMON-WEALTH.

He is in earnest of course. Is the Poet so too?

'What is the end of study?'--let me know.