Like witless antics,6 one another meet,

And all cry Hector! Hector's dead! O Hector !
Tro. Away! away!

Cas. Farewell: yet, soft! Hector, I take my leave:
Thou dost thyself and all our Troy deceive.

[Exit.

Hect. You are amazed, my liege, at her exclaim : Go in, and cheer the town: we'll forth, and fight; Do deeds worth praise, and tell you them at night. Pri. Farewell: the gods with safety stand about thee! [Exeunt severally PRIAM and HECTOR. Alarums.

Tro. They're at it, hark!-Proud Diomed, believe, I come to lose my arm, or win my sleeve.

As TROILUS is going out, enter from the other side PANDARUS. Pan. Do you hear, my lord? do you hear?

Tro. What now?

Pan. Here's a letter come from yond poor girl.

Tro. Let me read.

[Gives letter.

Pan. A whoreson tisick, a whoreson rascally tisick so troubles me, and the foolish fortune of this girl; and what one thing, what another, that I shall leave you one o' these days and I have a rheum in mine eyes too; and such an ache in my bones, that, unless a man were cursed, I cannot tell what to think on't. What says she there?

:

Tro. Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart ; Th' effect doth operate another way. [Tearing the letter. Go, wind, to wind, there turn and change together.—

My love with words and errors still she feeds;

But edifies another with her deeds.

[Exeunt severally.

6 Antics in the sense of buffoons. Repeatedly so. See page 69, note 15; also, vol. iv. page 198, note 4, and vol. xii. page 52, note II.

7 That is, "unless I have a curse resting upon me"; referring to the influence of a secret supernatural malediction. -"A rheum in the eyes" is

a morbid affection that sometimes keeps the eyes a-flow with tears.

SCENE IV..

- Plains between Troy and the Grecian Camp.

Alarums: excursions. Enter THERSITES.

Ther. Now they are clapper-clawing one another; I'll go look on. That dissembling abominable varlet, Diomed, has got that same scurvy doting foolish young knave's sleeve of Troy there in his helm: I would fain see them meet; that that same young Trojan ass, that loves the whore there, might send that Greekish whoremasterly villain, with the sleeve, back to the dissembling luxurious drab, of a sleeveless errand. O' the t'other side, the policy of those crafty sneering rascals that stale old mouse-eaten dry cheese, Nestor, and that same dog-fox, Ulysses-is not proved worth a blackberry. They set me up, in policy, that mongrel cur, Ajax, against that dog of as bad a kind, Achilles: and now is the cur Ajax prouder than the cur Achilles, and will not arm to-day; whereupon the Grecians begin to proclaim barbarism, and policy grows into an ill opinion.1 Soft! here comes sleeve, and t'other.

Enter DIOMEDES, TROILUS following.

Tro. Fly not; for, shouldst thou take the river Styx, I would swim after.

Dio.

Thou dost miscall retire:

I do not fly; but advantageous care

Withdrew me from the odds of multitude:

Have at thee !

Ther. Hold thy whore, Grecian ! now for thy whore,

1 To "proclaim barbarism" is, I take it, openly to make barbarism their cause; to favour or countenance it, as by public announcement. - Policy here means polity, one of its old senses; that is, a frame or state of civil order, as opposed to a barbarous state. To "grow into an ill opinion" is to incur disrepute or fall into contempt.

Trojan ! - now the sleeve! now the sleeveless!

[Exeunt TROILUS and DIOMEDES, fighting.

Enter HECTOR.

Hect. What art thou, Greek? art thou for Hector's

match?

Art thou of blood and honour?

Ther. No, no; I am a rascal; a scurvy railing knave; a

very filthy rogue.

Hect. I do believe thee; live.

[Exit. Ther. God-a-mercy,2 that thou wilt believe me; but a plague break thy neck for frighting me! What's become of

the wenching rogues? I think they have swallowed one another: I would laugh at that miracle: yet, in a sort, lechery eats itself. I'll seek them.

SCENE V. - Another Part of the Plains.

Enter DIOMEDES and a Servant.

Dio. Go, go, my servant, take thou Troilus' horse;
Present the fair steed to my lady Cressid :
Fellow, commend my service to her beauty;
Tell her I have chastised the amorous Trojan,
And am her knight by proof.

[Exit.

Serv.

I go, my lord.

[Exit.

Enter AGAMEMNON.

Agam. Renew, renew! The fierce Polydamas Hath beat down Menon bastard Margarelon

Hath Doreus prisoner,

:

And stands colossus-wise, waving his beam,1

2 God-a-mercy is God have thanks, or thanks be to God; mercy having

the sense of the French merci. See vol. xiv. page 197, note 25.

1 "His beam" is the shaft or staff of his lance. So in the description of Goliath's arms: "And the staff of his spear was like a weaver's beam."

Upon the pashèd 2 corses of the Kings
Epistrophus and Cedius: Polyxenes is slain;
Amphimachus and Thoas deadly hurt;
Patroclus ta'en or slain; and Palamedes
Sore hurt and bruised: the dreadful Sagittary 3
Appals our numbers. Haste we, Diomed,
To reinforcement, or we perish all.

Enter NESTOR.

Nest. Go, bear Patroclus' body to Achilles;
And bid the snail-paced Ajax arm for shame.
There is a thousand Hectors in the field:
Now here he fights on Galathe his horse,
And there lacks work; anon he's there afoot,
And there they fly or die, like scaled sculls 5
Before the belching whale; then is he yonder,
And there the strawy Greeks, ripe for his edge,
Fall down before him, like the mower's swath.
Here, there, and everywhere, he leaves and takes ;
Dexterity so obeying appetite,

That what he will he does; and does so much,
That proof is call'd impossibility."

2 Here, as before, pashèd is crushed, smashed. See page 252, note 28.
8 From The Destruction of Troy: “A mervayllous beaste that was called
Sagittayre, that behynde the myddes was an horse, and to-fore a man: this
beste was heery like an horse, and shotte well with a bowe: this beste made
the Grekes sore aferde, and slewe many of them with his bowe."

4 Still another instance of the old genitive form. See page 301, note 21.
5 Sculls is swarms, or what are sometimes called shoals. So in Drayton's
Polyolbion: "My silver-scaled sculs about my streams do sweep." And in
Paradise Lost, vii. 401:

Of fish that, with their fins and shining scales,
Glide under the green wave, in sculls that oft
Bank the mid-sea.

6 That is, proves that to be true which is called impossible; or turns al-
leged impossibility into fact.

Enter ULYSSES.

Ulyss. O, courage, courage, princes! great Achilles Is arming, weeping, cursing, vowing vengeance: Patroclus' wounds have roused his drowsy blood, Together with his mangled Myrmidons,

That noiseless, handless, hack'd and chipp'd, come to him,
Crying on Hector. Ajax hath lost a friend,

And foams at mouth, and he is arm'd and at it,
Roaring for Troilus; who hath done to-day
Mad and fantastic execution;

Engaging and redeeming of himself,

With such a careless force and forceless care,
As if that luck, in very spite of cunning,

Come, come, thou boy-queller, now show thy face;

Know what it is to meet Achilles angry.

Hector! where's Hector? I will none but Hector. [Exeunt.

7 In old language, to cry on a thing is to exclaim or cry out against it. Repeatedly so in Shakespeare. See vol. xiv. page 316, note 62.

8 To kill is the old meaning of to quell.