Tur.  Thou art in the right, my venerable cropshin, they will indeed; the tongue of the oracle never twang’d truer.  Your courtier cannot kiss his mistress’s slippers in quiet for them; nor your white innocent gallant pawn his revelling suit to make his punk a supper.  An honest decayed commander cannot skelder, cheat, nor be seen in a bawdy-house, but he shall be straight in one of their wormwood comedies.  They are grown licentious, the rogues; libertines, flat libertines.  They forget they are in the statute, the rascals; they are blazon’d there; there they are trick’d, they and their pedigrees; they need no other heralds, I wiss.

Ovid se.  Methinks, if nothing else, yet this alone, the very reading of the public edicts, should fright thee from commerce with them, and give thee distaste enough of their actions.  But this betrays what a student you are, this argues your proficiency in the law!

Ovid ju. 
   They wrong me, sir, and do abuse you more,
   That blow your ears with these untrue reports. 
   I am not known unto the open stage,
   Nor do I traffic in their theatres: 
   Indeed, I do acknowledge, at request
   Of some near friends, and honourable Romans,
   I have begun a poem of that nature.

Ovid se.  You have, sir, a poem! and where is it?  That’s the law you study.

Ovid ju.  Cornelius Gallus borrowed it to read.

Ovid se.  Cornelius Gallus! there’s another gallant too hath drunk of the same poison, and Tibullus and Propertius.  But these are gentlemen of means and revenues now.  Thou art a younger brother, and hast nothing but they bare exhibition; which I protest shall be bare indeed, if thou forsake not these unprofitable by-courses, and that timely too.  Name me a profest poet, that his poetry did ever afford him so much as a competency.  Ay, your god of poets there, whom all of you admire and reverence so much, Homer, he whose worm-eaten statue must not be spewed against, but with hallow’d lips and groveling adoration, what was he? what was he?

Tuc.  Marry, I’ll tell thee, old swaggerer; he was a poor blind, rhyming rascal, that lived obscurely up and down in booths and tap-houses, and scarce ever made a good meal in his sleep, the whoreson hungry beggar.

Ovid se.  He says well:—­nay, I know this nettles you now; but answer me, is it not true?  You’ll tell me his name shall live; and that now being dead his works have eternised him, and made him divine:  but could this divinity feed him while he lived? could his name feast him?

Tuc.  Or purchase him a senator’s revenue, could it?

Ovid se.  Ay, or give him place in the commonwealth? worship, or attendants? make him be carried in his litter?

Tuc.  Thou speakest sentences, old Bias.

Lup.  All this the law will do, young sir, if you’ll follow it.

Ovid se.  If he be mine, he shall follow and observe what I will apt him to, or I profess here openly and utterly to disclaim him.