3 Gip. His guards are magnanimity and love.
4 Gip. His ushers, counsel, truth and piety.
5 Gip. And all that follows him, felicity.

SONG 5.

Jack. Oh that we understood

Our good!

There's happiness indeed in blood,
And store,

But how much more,
When virtue's flood

In the same stream doth hit?

As that grows high with years, so happiness with it.

Capt. Love, love his fortune then, and virtues

known,

Who is the top of men,

But makes the happiness our own; Since where the prince for goodness is renown'd, The subject with felicity is crown'd.

At Burleigh, Bever, and now last at Windsor,
Which shews we are gipsies of no common kind, sir:
You have beheld (and with delight) their change,
And how they came transform'd, may think it strange;
It being a thing not touch'd at by our poet,
Good Ben slept there, or else forgot to shew it:
But lest it prove like wonder to the sight,
To see a gipsy, as an Ethiop, white,

Know, that what dy'd our faces, was an ointment
Made, and laid on by master Woolfe's appointment,
The court Lycanthropos; yet without spells,
By a mere barber, and no magic else,
It was fetch'd off with water and a ball;
And to our transformation, this is all,
Save what the master fashioner calls his:
For to a gipsy's metamorphosis,

Who doth disguise his habit and his face,
And takes on a false person by his place,
The power of poetry can never fail her,
Assisted by a barber and a tailor.

THE MASQUE OF AUGURS.

WITH THE SEVERAL

ANTIMASQUES.

PRESENTED ON TWELFTH-NIGHT, 1622.

THE MASQUE OF AUGURS.] From the folio 1641, where it is wretchedly printed. Every page that I turn over in this volume renews my regret at the remissness of Jonson, in not giving these little pieces himself, to the press. In this, as in every thing else, his character has been misrepresented. He is constantly spoken of as extremely jealous of the fate of his works, as tremblingly alive to the accuracy of his page; whereas nothing is so certain, as that, for the greatest part of his dramatic career, he was as careless of their appearance as any of his contemporaries, not excepting Shakspeare. Want itself could not drive him to the revision and publication of a single drama; and for the long space of twenty years, (i. e. from the appearance of the first folio to his death,) he gave nothing to the press, (unless Love's Triumph, or Chloridia, was published by him, which I can scarcely believe,) but the New Inn, to which he was compelled by the triumphant ridicule of his enemies, who represented that unfortunate piece as worse, perhaps, than it really was.

66

A new whim has seized the editors in this place, and they have given the dramatis persona, or presenters of the first Antimasque."

Notch, a brewer's clerk.

Slug, a lighterman.
Vangoose, a rare artist.
Urson, the bear-ward.

Groom of the Revels.

Lady Alewife.

Her two women.

Three dancing bears.

All from St. Katherine's.

THE MASQUE OF AUGURS.

SCENE,

The Court Buttery-hatch.

Enter NOTCH and SLUG.

Notch.

JOME, now my head's in, I'll even venture the whole: I have seen the lions ere now, and he that hath seen them may see the king.

Slug. I think he may; but have a care you go not too nigh, neighbour Notch, lest you chance to have a tally made on your pate, and be clawed with a cudgel; there is as much danger going too near the king, as the lions.

Enter Groom of the Revels.

Groom. Whither, whither now, gamesters? what is the business, the affair? stop, I beseech you.

Notch. This must be an officer or nothing, he is so pert and brief in his demands: a pretty man! and a pretty man is a little o' this side nothing; howsoever we must not be daunted now, I am sure I am a greater man than he out of the court, and I have lost nothing of my size since I came to it.

Groom. Hey-da! what's this? a hogshead of beer broke out of the king's buttery, or some Dutch hulk!