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things, and tells me 'tis not safe to sleep betwixt my lover's arms tonight: why, sure I dream, I was not wont to have these dubious fancies? I have begun to love him, and will now never desert his friendship until death; but thus I tamper poison for myself; but, were I sure to drink the baneful draught, I could not now go back :

For, when the flesh is nuzzled once in vice,

The sweets of sin make hell a paradise.

O you are welcome, Sir.

Enter Directory.

Direct. Worthy of all love's joys, Hast thou not blamed my tardy stay? Thou art most certain, sure, thy husband is far off; if he should take me with thee, his jealousy and wrath might prompt him to strange actions.

Prisc. I have not the least fear of his approach.

Direct. Come then, my Ptixdra, and let us taste those joys thy husband is unworthy of.

ACT V.

Directory and Priscilla put forth in a bed, both sleeping.

Enter Anarchy, with a torch.

Anar. TITAN to the Antipodes is gone,

To luminate another horizon:

'Tis now dead midnight, Morpheus, death's eldest brother,
Hover about this place, and charm the sense

Of these two creatures made of impudence;
Are they so shallow, to conceive that I
Am made of mimical pantomimy?

O woman, woman, who art compounded of all ill, I durst have pawned my soul, this wife of mine had harboured a soul as white as the Alpine snow; but she is ulcerous and deformed. Who knows how often they have met and wallowed in their active sweats? What woman may be trusted?

Lust is a subtle syren, ever training

Souls to destruction, by her secret feigning:
She is the prince of darkness' eldest daughter,
Wanting no craft her cunning sire hath taught her:

'Tis like Medusa's tress; and, if it be

Twin'd in the body of man's living tree,

Man's heart of flesh converts, if he have one,

By secret vigour, to unliving stone.

Damn'd strumpet, have I ta'en you with your lecher?"
African panthers, Hyrcan tygers fierce,
Cleonian lions, and Danonian bears,
Are not so ravenous, whom hunger pin'd,
As women that are lecherously inclin'd.

But I prolong their lives, and tire the ferry-man with expectation.Stay, it is not wisdom to cope with two that struggle for their lives. these are the bonds of death. [Ties them to the bed.] So awake, you lustful pair. [They awake.

Direct. Ha!-we are undone.

Anar. Yes, Directory, e're winged time add one hour more to this declining night, thou shalt be numbered with the dead.

Direct. O my unhappy fate!

Prisc. Dear husband, spare our lives, and then inflict what punishment thou wilt.

Anar. O my fine Directory, camest thou from Scotland hither to cheat us out of our religion, our lives, our king; and, covering thy ills with virtue's cloke, act even those crimes, which but to hear them named would fright the cannibals? And shall we not strive to circumvent thee?

Direct. I pray, hear me, Sir.

Anar. Hath guilt emboldened so thy mind, that thou darest view my face, and speak?

Prisc. Sir, I confess, my crime cannot be expiated, but with blood; but, if mild pity harbour in your breast, I do implore your mercy.

Anar. Peace, vile strumpet; thou mayest as well attempt to scale the heavens, and ride on the sun-beams, as strive with talk to mitigate my fury, and stay the course of my revenge; but first, good Directory, I will stab you by the book, and torture you, not opening a vein.

Dumb Shew. Solemn Musick.

One, representing Directory, accompanied with a rabble in the habit of elders, running as flying from soldiers, who pursue them with their swords drawn.

Did you behold the pageant; great Babylon is fallen; an English army hath extirpated presbytery, root and branch; the elders may, in Scotland, court Susanna, here are too many Daniels to sift them; and now,

Sir, you must go, but not to Scotland; that's but purgatory; yet where you'll find many blue bonnets more, I mean to hell. Thus I dismiss thy soul.

Direct. Hold, Sir, and, e're you send my soul to wander in the invisible land, hear what I now shall utter: By heaven and earth, and him that made them both, I ne'er was guilty, not in thought, till this dire hour, of the defiling of your marriage bed.

Anar. Dost think, dull fool, that all thy protestations, thy heav'd up hands and sighs, were they as numerous as the sand hid in the Baltick. sea, should raise my heart for to relent? No, in thy death England gathers life, whose happiness I wish: Thus for it work.

[Stabs him with a ponyard. Direct. O! thou hast op'd a flood-gate, which will not close, till my heart-blood is drain'd.

Prics. If thou wer't born of woman, spare my life.

Anar. O thou luxurious strumpet, hath not thy guilt, or fear, bereft thy tongue of utterance? Methinks thou should'st, when thinking on thy fact, convert to stone, and save my hand a labour to send thee to another world. There, strumpet.

[Stabs her.

Prisc. O heaven!

Anar. So-How like you this? Phlebotomising only can cure the fever in your blood. Why don't you mingle limbs? Get up and

at it.

Direct. Like to a ship dismember'd of her sails, and cuff'd from side to side, by surly waves, 'so doth my soul fare:

As that poor vessel, rests my brittle stay,
Nearer the land, still nearer cast away.

Presbytery in my fall receives its mortal wound, and ne'er must look in
England to bear sway. O, O, I see in this the power of Providence:
Whose stronger hand restrains our wilful pow'rs,

A will above doth rule the will of ours.

[He dies. Anar. He's dead, but she remains with life: And wilt thou not accompany thy lecher, that he may man thee into Charon's boat?

Prisc. My soul disdains her habitation, and now will needs be fleeting: Know, Sir, for now I fear not all your fury, I lov❜d Directory as my own soul, and knew him oftener than yourself; for which may heaven forgive me! For his sake I could wish to live, but now he's gone, what should I do on earth?

Death our delights continually doth sever;

Virtue alone abandoneth us never.

[She dies. Anar. She's gone; farewell for ever: May heaven forgive thy fault! I would not prosecute revenge so far, as wish thy soul destruction : What now remains for me? I must be gone far hence, e're Sol visit our horizon; let fortune do her worst.

Her frowns he fears not, nor her hott'st alarms,
That bears against them patience for his arms.

Exit.

ST. EDWARD'S GHOST,

OR

ANTI-NORMANISM;

Being a pathetical complaint and motion, in the behalf of our English nation, against her grand, yet neglected grievance, Normanism.

1

Quænam (malum) est ista voluntaria servitus?

Cicero, in Orat. Philip. I.

London, printed for Richard Wodenothe, at the Star, under Peter's Church in Cornhill. 1647. Quarto, containing twenty-eight pages.

AD LECTOREM.

READER,

THIS essay having long

*

waited for room and free audience on the publick stage, doth now appear: If thou hast a mind to. quarrel

Being written Anno Domini, 1642.

with it, it must be against the matter, or the form; against the matter thou who art English canst not, without betraying either thy ignorance, in not knowing thy nation's dearest rights, or thy impiety in opposing them, being no other than what she enjoyed, and joyed in, till she lost them by perfidious robbers. But if it be the form that thou disrelishest, I confess, it needs much favour, and therefore should gladly have seen thee, or some other, to have prevented it with a better; yet, for thy better bearing with the prolixity of the historical part of it (occasioned by the copiousness of the subject, worth, and opposite arrogance) thou mayest remember, that it was King Ahasuerus's choice recreation to review the acts of his ancestors, and that the Jews could hear even St. Stephen reciting their high pedigree patiently; however, it shall suffice me in this business to have attempted to have done worthily, and I doubt not but every true Englishman will not only indulge the work's weakness, but also lend both his heart and hand in all lawful means toward the accomplishing of its demands, as without which obtained, at least in a good degree, this nation can never be honourable, nor, consequently, happy. Vale.

JOHN HARE.

W

HILE I behold and revolve the great and laborious inversions and eversions of things effected by the representative body of this kingdom, in this and precedent parliaments, with that liberal and vast expence of English blood, lives, labour, and cost, which, with the height of animosity, and seeming magnanimity, former generations have bestowed, and the present doth not spare in asserting the publick causes of this nation, and all, excepting what is about some ecclesiastical niceties, for the securing, or enlarging, of our estates and privileges from domestick oppression, and concentered in the object of ease and commodity, and such like petty advantages; I cannot but with shame and grief of mind look upon the genius of our nation, as seeming to have transmigred from that metamorphosed prince of Chaldea, who, being transmitted from the top of humanity, into the condition of beasts of the field, for a great part of his ensuing age, made fodder, and other brutish accommodations, the proper subject of his content and contentions, not harbouring, in the mean time, a back-looking thought towards that royal estate, by the possession whereof, he had been once the most eminent of the mortals of his age; or, as resembling some strange hero, who being captived, and marked for a slave, should have his senses so captivated also, as to be more ambitious to be chambered in his jail, and to glitter in gilt fetters, than to be restored to his lost freedom and reputation, contending with earnest extremity for the one, but not breathing so much as a wish for the procurement of the other.

That this is our case, I would that the heavy, long, and overlasting heaven grant not everlasting, groans of the hereditary liberty and honour of our nation (the choicest and most essential fundamentals of her temporary well being, and the most precious part of her earthly patrimony he happy ornaments of her youth) long since overthrown, and for many

i.e. The title and quality of a free nation.

ages together, lying patients, most wretchedly, under a mass of unworthy oppression, did not too evidently evince, whilst we, her sons, in the interim, sparing no endeavours in the behalf of our less valuable rights, are, in this respect, so stupidly senseless, that whereas we have cause enough, with that Ænean prisoner Enceladus (the eternal monument of dejected greatness) to testify the weight of our disgraceful burden with fiery sighs, and sulphureous blasts of indignation; we, contrariwise, are so far from any reluctance, as to lie in a dead sleep under it, as under our grave-stone; having inscribed thereon the epitaph of our honour in red letters of shame, not daring, or not willing, so much as to breathe forth a complaint, or to wish for a removal of that, than which there is nothing under heaven more insufferable to ingenuous men, and to such as would be accounted other than the progeny of Cham, preordained to servility. This mountain of dishonour, which the English name hath so long groaned under, and yet we have never once adventured to complain of, much less endeavoured to remove, is no other than that infamous title of a conquered nation, and that by so infamous a conquest; but, more especially, the still visible fetters of our captivity, the evidences of that title; those foreign laws, language, names, titles, and customs, then introduced, and to this day, domineering over ours; our stupid degenerateness consists in this, That in all our contentions by pen or sword, in all the essays of our poets or orators, (excepting some few, whereof Vergestan deserves to be memorised) I could never yet find any considerable endeavour for our vindication from this thraldom and disgrace; but rather, like tamed creatures, or unnaturalled Janizaries, we sooth and applaud ourselves in these gives and servile robes, as patrician ornaments; and (that, which, methinks, no true Englishman can observe without indignation) many of those that would be accounted to have honoured our land, with their pens, have placed that their honouring us for a great part, in celebrating the glory of that Normanism and Francism, which the desert of our sins hath inflicted on us, and seem to have sacrificed their love and duty to their own nation, together with their discretion, for an holocaust on the altar of that name, which is diametrically eninity to the English; and such are those that ascribe so much worth to the Norman blood, and strive to pen up all nobility and gentry within the accursed catalogue of those names that came from the Gallick continent.

Indignities that merit a Lucan's genius, and Tully's dicendi vis, to lay open and explode them; but since the such of this nation, contrary to my perpetual and earnest wishes and expectation, are undutifully silent herein; duty to my country shall make it no indiscretion in me to undertake the task, though, alas! performing it rather by an intimation, than due illustration of the truths which follow.

There is no man that understands rightly what an Englishman is, but knows withal, that we are a member of the Teutonick nation, and descended out of Germany; a descent so honourable and happy, if duly considered, as that the like could not have been fetched from any other part of Europe, nor scarce of the universe; which will be plain and manifest, if we take a just survey of the gloriousness of that our mother na tion, and that' in the sundry respects of her ancient and illustrious original, her generous qualification, and magnifick and warlike nature; her

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