SIMON
    Why, whither should we go?

    SIR WALTER
    You to the Court, where now your brother John
    Commits a rape on Fortune.

    SIMON
    Luck to John! 
    A light-heel’d strumpet, when the sport is done.

    SIR WALTER
    You to the sweet society of your equals,
    Where the world’s fashion smiles on youth and beauty.

    MARGARET
    Where young men’s flatteries cozen young maids’ beauty,
    There pride oft gets the vantage hand of duty,
    There sweet humility withers.

    SIMON
    Mistress Margaret,
    How fared my brother John, when you left Devon?

    MARGARET
    John was well, Sir.

    SIMON
    ’Tis now nine months almost,
    Since I saw home.  What new friends has John made? 
    Or keeps he his first love?—­I did suspect
    Some foul disloyalty.  Now do I know,
    John has prov’d false to her, for Margaret weeps. 
    It is a scurvy brother.

    SIR WALTER
    Fie upon it. 
    All men are false, I think.  The date of love
    Is out, expired, its stories all grown stale,
    O’erpast, forgotten, like an antique tale
    Of Hero and Leander.

SIMON I have known some men that are too general-contemplative for the narrow passion.  I am in some sort a general lover.

MARGARET In the name of the boy God, who plays at hood-man-blind with the Muses, and cares not whom he catches:  what is it you love?

    SIMON
    Simply, all things that live,
    From the crook’d worm to man’s imperial form,
    And God-resembling likeness.  The poor fly,
    That makes short holyday in the sun beam,
    And dies by some child’s hand.  The feeble bird
    With little wings, yet greatly venturous
    In the upper sky.  The fish in th’ other element,
    That knows no touch of eloquence.  What else? 
    Yon tall and elegant stag,
    Who paints a dancing shadow of his horns
    In the water, where he drinks.

MARGARET I myself love all these things, yet so as with a difference:—­ for example, some animals better than others, some men rather than other men; the nightingale before the cuckoo, the swift and graceful palfrey before the slow and asinine mule.  Your humour goes to confound all qualities.  What sports do you use in the forest?—­

    SIMON
    Not many; some few, as thus:—­
    To see the sun to bed, and to arise,
    Like some hot amourist with glowing eyes,
    Bursting the lazy bands of sleep that bound him,
    With all his fires and travelling glories round him. 
    Sometimes the moon on soft night clouds to rest,
    Like beauty nestling in a young man’s breast,
    And all the winking stars, her handmaids, keep
    Admiring silence, while those lovers sleep.