Re-enter Mosca with Nano, Androgyno, and Castrone.

Nan. Now, room for fresh gamesters, who do will you to know,
They do bring you neither play nor university show;
And therefore do entreat you, that whatsoever they rehearse,
May not fare a whit the worse, for the false pace of the verse.
If you wonder at this, you will wonder more ere we pass,
For know, here is inclosed the soul of Pythagoras,
That juggler divine, as hereafter shall follow;
Which soul, fast and loose, sir, came first from Apollo,
And was breath’d into æthalides, Mercurius his son,
Where it had the gift to remember all that ever was done.
From thence it fled forth, and made quick transmigration
To goldly-lock’d Euphorbus, who was killed in good fashion,
At the siege of old Troy, by the cuckold of Sparta.
Hermotimus was next (I find it in my charta)
To whom it did pass, where no sooner it was missing
But with one Pyrrhus of Delos it learn’d to go a fishing;
And thence did it enter the sophist of Greece.
From Pythagore, she went into a beautiful piece,
Hight Aspasia, the meretrix; and the next toss of her
Was again of a whore, she became a philosopher,
Crates the cynick, as it self doth relate it:
Since kings, knights, and beggars, knaves, lords, and fools gat it,
Besides ox and ass, camel, mule, goat, and brock,
In all which it hath spoke, as in the cobler’s cock.
But I come not here to discourse of that matter,
Or his one, two, or three, or his great oath, By quater!
His musics, his trigon, his golden thigh,
Or his telling how elements shift, but I
Would ask, how of late thou hast suffered translation,
And shifted thy coat in these days of reformation.

And. Like one of the reformed, a fool, as you see,
Counting all old doctrine heresie.

Nan. But not on thine own forbid meats hast thou ventured?

And. On fish, when first a Carthusian I enter’d.

Nan. Why, then thy dogmatical silence hath left thee?

And. Of that an obstreperous lawyer bereft me.

Nan. O wonderful change, when sir lawyer forsook thee!
For Pythagore’s sake, what body then took thee?

And. A good dull mule.

Nan. And how! by that means
Thou wert brought to allow of the eating of beans?

And. Yes.

Nan. But from the mule into whom didst thou pass?

And. Into a very strange beast, by some writers call’d an ass;
By others, a precise, pure, illuminate brother,
Of those devour flesh, and sometimes one another;
And will drop you forth a libel, or a sanctified lie,
Betwixt every spoonful of a nativity-pie.

Nan. Now quit thee, for heaven, of that profane nation,
And gently report thy next transmigration.

And. To the same that I am.

Nan. A creature of delight,
And, what is more than a fool, an hermaphrodite!
Now, prithee, sweet soul, in all thy variation,
Which body would’st thou choose, to keep up thy station?

And. Troth, this I am in: even here would I tarry.

Nan. ’Cause here the delight of each sex thou canst vary?