Henry IV, Part II, William Shakespeare [love letters to the dead txt] 📗

took it like a sensible lord. I have chequed him for it, and the young lion repents; marry, not in ashes and sackcloth, but in new silk and old sack. Chief-Justice Well, God send the prince a better companion! Falstaff God send the companion a better prince! I cannot rid my hands of him. Chief-Justice Well, the king hath severed you and Prince Harry: I hear you are going with Lord John of Lancaster against the Archbishop and the Earl of Northumberland. Falstaff Yea; I thank your pretty sweet wit for it. But look you pray, all you that kiss my lady Peace at home, that our armies join not in a hot day; for, by the Lord, I take but two shirts out with me, and I mean not to sweat extraordinarily: if it be a hot day, and I brandish any thing but a bottle, I would I might never spit white again. There is not a dangerous action can peep out his head but I am thrust upon it: well, I cannot last ever: but it was alway yet the trick of our English nation, if they have a good thing, to make it too common. If ye will needs say I am an old man, you should give me rest. I would to God my name were not so terrible to the enemy as it is: I were better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion. Chief-Justice Well, be honest, be honest; and God bless your expedition! Falstaff Will your lordship lend me a thousand pound to furnish me forth? Chief-Justice Not a penny, not a penny; you are too impatient to bear crosses. Fare you well: commend me to my cousin Westmoreland. Exeunt Chief-Justice and Servant. Falstaff If I do, fillip me with a three-man beetle. A man can no more separate age and covetousness than a’ can part young limbs and lechery: but the gout galls the one, and the pox pinches the other; and so both the degrees prevent my curses. Boy! Page Sir? Falstaff What money is in my purse? Page Seven groats and two pence. Falstaff I can get no remedy against this consumption of the purse: borrowing only lingers and lingers it out, but the disease is incurable. Go bear this letter to my Lord of Lancaster; this to the prince; this to the Earl of Westmoreland; and this to old Mistress Ursula, whom I have weekly sworn to marry since I perceived the first white hair on my chin. About it: you know where to find me. Exit Page. A pox of this gout! or, a gout of this pox! for the one or the other plays the rogue with my great toe. ’Tis no matter if I do halt; I have the wars for my colour, and my pension shall seem the more reasonable. A good wit will make use of any thing: I will turn diseases to commodity. Exit. Scene III

York. The Archbishop’s palace.

Enter the Archbishop, the Lords Hastings, Mowbray, and Bardolph. Archbishop

Thus have you heard our cause and known our means;
And, my most noble friends, I pray you all,
Speak plainly your opinions of our hopes:
And first, lord marshal, what say you to it?

Mowbray

I well allow the occasion of our arms;
But gladly would be better satisfied
How in our means we should advance ourselves
To look with forehead bold and big enough
Upon the power and puissance of the king.

Hastings

Our present musters grow upon the file
To five and twenty thousand men of choice;
And our supplies live largely in the hope
Of great Northumberland, whose bosom burns
With an incensed fire of injuries.

Lord Bardolph

The question then, Lord Hastings, standeth thus;
Whether our present five and twenty thousand
May hold up head without Northumberland?

Hastings With him, we may. Lord Bardolph

Yea, marry, there’s the point:
But if without him we be thought too feeble,
My judgment is, we should not step too far
Till we had his assistance by the hand;
For in a theme so bloody-faced as this
Conjecture, expectation, and surmise
Of aids incertain should not be admitted.

Archbishop

’Tis very true, Lord Bardolph; for indeed
It was young Hotspur’s case at Shrewsbury.

Lord Bardolph

It was, my lord; who lined himself with hope,
Eating the air on promise of supply,
Flattering himself in project of a power
Much smaller than the smallest of his thoughts:
And so, with great imagination
Proper to madmen, led his powers to death
And winking leap’d into destruction.

Hastings

But, by your leave, it never yet did hurt
To lay down likelihoods and forms of hope.

Lord Bardolph

Yes, if this present quality of war,
Indeed the instant action: a cause on foot
Lives so in hope as in an early spring
We see the appearing buds; which to prove fruit,
Hope gives not so much warrant as despair
That frosts will bite them. When we mean to build,
We first survey the plot, then draw the model;
And when we see the figure of the house,
Then must we rate the cost of the erection;
Which if we find outweighs ability,
What do we then but draw anew the model
In fewer offices, or at last desist
To build at all? Much more, in this great work,
Which is almost to pluck a kingdom down
And set another up, should we survey
The plot of situation and the model,
Consent upon a sure foundation,
Question surveyors, know our own estate,
How able such a work to undergo,
To weigh against his opposite; or else
We fortify in paper and in figures,
Using the names of men instead of men:
Like one that draws the model of a house
Beyond his power to build it; who, half through,
Gives o’er and leaves his part-created cost
A naked subject to the weeping clouds
And waste for churlish winter’s tyranny.

Hastings

Grant that our hopes, yet likely of fair birth,
Should be still-born, and that we now possess’d
The utmost man of expectation,
I think we are a body strong enough,
Even as we are, to equal with the king.

Lord Bardolph What, is the king but five and twenty thousand? Hastings

To us no