GRAY
Virtue in cold water! ha! ha! ha!—­

JOHN Because your poet-born hath an internal wine, richer than lippara or canaries, yet uncrushed from any grapes of earth, unpressed in mortal wine-presses.

THIRD GENTLEMAN
What may be the name of this wine?

JOHN It hath as many names as qualities.  It is denominated indifferently, wit, conceit, invention, inspiration, but its most royal and comprehensive name is fancy.

THIRD GENTLEMAN
And where keeps he this sovereign liquor?

JOHN Its cellars are in the brain, whence your true poet deriveth intoxication at will; while his animal spirits, catching a pride from the quality and neighbourhood of their noble relative, the brain, refuse to be sustained by wines and fermentations of earth.

THIRD GENTLEMAN
But is your poet-born alway tipsy with this liquor?

JOHN
He hath his stoopings and reposes; but his proper element is the sky,
and in the suburbs of the empyrean.

THIRD GENTLEMAN
Is your wine-intellectual so exquisite? henceforth, I, a man of plain
conceit, will, in all humility, content my mind with canaries.

FOURTH GENTLEMAN
I am for a song or a catch.  When will the catches come on, the sweet
wicked catches?

JOHN
They cannot be introduced with propriety before midnight.  Every man must
commit his twenty bumpers first.  We are not yet well roused.  Frank
Lovel, the glass stands with you.

LOVEL
Gentlemen, the Duke. (Fills.)

ALL
The Duke. (They drink.)

GRAY
Can any tell, why his Grace, being a Papist—­

JOHN
Pshaw! we will have no questions of state now.  Is not this his Majesty’s
birth-day?

GRAY
What follows?

JOHN
That every man should sing, and be joyful, and ask no questions.

SECOND GENTLEMAN
Damn politics, they spoil drinking.

THIRD GENTLEMAN
For certain,’tis a blessed monarchy.

SECOND GENTLEMAN
The cursed fanatic days we have seen!  The times have been when swearing
was out of fashion.

THIRD GENTLEMAN
And drinking.

FIRST GENTLEMAN
And wenching.

GRAY The cursed yeas and forsooths, which we have heard uttered, when a man could not rap out an innocent oath, but strait the air was thought to be infected.

LOVEL ’Twas a pleasant trick of the saint, which that trim puritan Swear-not-at-all Smooth-speech used, when his spouse chid him with an oath for committing with his servant-maid, to cause his house to be fumigated with burnt brandy, and ends of scripture, to disperse the devil’s breath, as he termed it.

ALL
Ha! ha! ha!

GRAY But ’twas pleasanter, when the other saint Resist-the-devil-and-he-will-flee-from-thee Pure-man was overtaken in the act, to plead an illusio visus, and maintain his sanctity upon a supposed power in the adversary to counterfeit the shapes of things.