If you will jest with me, know my aspect,
And fashion your demeanor to my looks,
Or I will beat this method in your sconce.

Dro. S. Sconce call you it? so you would leave battering, I had rather have it a head: an you use these blows long, I must get a sconce for my head, and ensconce it too; or else I shall seek my wit in my shoulders. But, I pray, sir, why am I beaten ?

Ant. S. Dost thou not know?

Dro. S. Nothing, sir, but that I am beaten.

Ant. S. Shall I tell you why?

Dro. S. Ay, sir, and wherefore; for they say every why hath a wherefore.

Ant. S. Why, first, for flouting me; and then, wherefore, For urging it the second time to me.

Dro. S. Was there ever any man thus beaten out of season, When in the why and the wherefore is neither rhyme nor reason?

Well, sir, I thank you.

Ant. S. Thank me, sir! for what?

Dro. S. Marry, sir, for this something that you gave me

for nothing.

Ant. S. I'll make you amends next, to give you nothing for something. But say, sir, is it dinner-time?

Dro. S. No, sir: I think the meat wants that I have.

Ant. S. In good time, sir; what's that?

Dro. S. Basting.

Ant. S. Well, sir, then 'twill be dry.

Dro. S. If it be, sir, I pray you, eat none of it.

Ant. S. Your reason?

Dro. S. Lest it make you choleric,3 and purchase me another dry basting.

8 Such was thought to be the effect of meats so much done as to be undone. In the Taming of the Shrew, iv. 1, Petruchio sends off the meat

Ant. S. Well, sir, learn to jest in good time: there's a time for all things.

Dro. S. I durst have denied that, before you were so choleric.

Ant. S. By what rule, sir?

Dro. S. Marry, sir, by a rule as plain as the plain bald pate of father Time himself.

Ant. S. Let's hear it.

Dro. S. There's no time for a man to recover his hair that grows bald by nature.

Ant. S. May he not do it by fine and recovery? 4

Dro. S. Yes, to pay a fine for a periwig, and recover the lost hair of another man.

Ant. S. Why is Time such a niggard of hair, being, as it is, so plentiful an excrement? 5

Dro. S. Because it is a blessing that he bestows on beasts: and what he hath scanted men in hair, he hath given them in wit.

Ant. S. Why, but there's many a man hath more hair than wit.6

Dro. S. Not a man of those but he hath the wit to lose his hair.7

because "'twas burnt and dried away; and I expressly am forbid to touch it, for it engenders choler."

4 Fine and recovery is the name of an old legal process, now out of use, for testing and assuring the tenure of property. Ritson, a lawyer, describes it as "the strongest assurance known to English law."

5 Excrement from excrescere, to grow forth, was used of whatever seems to vegetate from the body, such as hair, beard, and nails.

6 This expression seems to have been proverbial. It is well illustrated in the following lines, 1656, upon Suckling's Aglaura, which was printed in folio:

This great voluminous pamphlet may be said

To be like one that hath more hair than head;
More excrement than body: - trees which sprout
With broadest leaves have still the smallest fruit.

7 Alluding to the loss of hair by what was called the French disease.

Ant. S. Why, thou didst conclude hairy men plain dealers without wit.

Dro. S. The plainer dealer, the sooner lost: yet he loseth it in a kind of jollity.

Ant. S. Nay, not sure, in a thing falling.

Dro. S. The one, to save the money that he spends in trimming; the other, that at dinner they should not drop in his porridge.

Ant. S. You would all this time have proved there is no time for all things.

Dro. S. Marry, and did, sir; namely, no time to recover hair lost by nature.

Ant. S. But your reason was not substantial, why there is no time to recover.

Dro. S. Thus I mend it: Time himself is bald, and therefore to the world's end will have bald followers.

Ant. S. I knew 'twould be a bald conclusion: But, soft! who wafts 8 us yonder?

Enter ADRIANA and LUCIANA.

Adr. Ay, ay, Antipholus, look strange and frown: Some other mistress hath thy sweet aspects;

I am not Adriana nor thy wife.

The time was once when thou unurged wouldst vow
That never words were music to thine ear,

That never object pleasing in thine eye,
That never touch well-welcome to thy hand,

8 To waft is to beckon with the hand.

That never meat sweet-savour'd in thy taste,

Unless I spake, or look'd, or touch'd, or carved to thee.

How comes it now, my husband, O, how comes it,

That thou art thus estrangèd from thyself?

Thyself I call it, being strange to me,

That, undividable, incorporate,

Am better than thy dear self's better part.
Ah, do not tear away thyself from me!
For know, my love, as easy mayst thou fall 9
A drop of water in the breaking gulf,
And take unmingled thence that drop again,
Without addition or diminishing,

As take from me thyself, and not me too.
How dearly would it touch thee to the quick,
Shouldst thou but hear I were licentious,
And that this body, consecrate to thee,
By ruffian lust should be contaminate!
Wouldst thou not spit at me and spurn at me,
And hurl the name of husband in my face,
And tear the stain'd skin off my harlot-brow,
And from my false hand cut the wedding-ring,
And break it with a deep-divorcing vow?

I know thou canst; and therefore see thou do it.

I am possess'd with an adulterate blot;

My blood is mingled with the grime of lust:

For if we two be one, and thou play false,

I do digest the poison of thy flesh,

Being strumpeted by thy contagion.

Keep, then, fair league and truce with thy true bed ;

I live unstain'd, thou undishonouréd.

Ant. S. Plead you to me, fair dame? I know you not:

In Ephesus I am but two hours old,

As strange unto your town as to your talk;

9 Fall as a transitive verb; let fall. Often so.

Who, every word by all my wit being scann'd,

Want wit, in all, one word to understand.

Luc. Fie, brother! how the world is changed with you! When were you wont to use my sister thus?

She sent for you by Dromio home to dinner.

Ant. S. By Dromio!

Dro. S. By me!

Adr. By thee; and this thou didst return from him, ·

That he did buffet thee, and, in his blows,

Denied my house for his, me for his wife.

Ant. S. Did you converse, sir, with this gentlewoman?

What is the course and drift of your compact?

Dro. S. I, sir! I never saw her till this time.

Ant. S. Villain, thou liest; for even her very words

Didst thou deliver to me on the mart.

Dro. S. I never spake with her in all my life.

Ant. S. How can she thus, then, call us by our names, Unless it be by inspiration?

Adr. How ill agrees it with your gravity
To counterfeit thus grossly with your slave,
Abetting him to thwart me in my mood!
Be it my wrong you are from me exempt,1o
But wrong not that wrong with a more contempt.
Come, I will fasten on this sleeve of thine :

Thou art an elm, my husband, —— I a vine,11
Whose weakness, married to thy stronger state,
Makes me with thy strength to communicate:

10 An odd use of exempt, meaning parted, separated, or taken away. So in a letter from the Earl of Nottingham in favour of Edward Alleyn, cited by Malone: "Situate in a very remote and exempt place near Goulding

Lane."

11 So in Paradise Lost, v. 215: "Or they led the vine to wed her elm: she, spoused, about him twines her marriageable arms." Douce remarks that there is something extremely beautiful in making the vine the lawful spouse of the elm, and the parasite plants here named its concubines.