Lady P. Which of your poets? Petrarch, or Tasso, or Dante?
Guarini? Ariosto? Aretine?
Cieco di Hadria? I have read them all.

Volp. Is every thing a cause to my destruction?

[Aside.

Lady P. I think I have two or three of them about me.

Volp. The sun, the sea, will sooner both stand still
Than her eternal tongue! nothing can ’scape it.

[Aside.

Lady P. Here’s Pastor Fido—

Volp. Profess obstinate silence;
That’s now my safest.

[Aside.

Lady P. All our English writers,
I mean such as are happy in the Italian,
Will deign to steal out of this author, mainly:
Almost as much as from Montagnié:
He has so modern and facile a vein,
Fitting the time, and catching the court-ear!
Your Petrarch is more passionate, yet he,
In days of sonnetting, trusted them with much:
Dante is hard, and few can understand him.
But, for a desperate wit, there’s Aretine;
Only, his pictures are a little obscene—
You mark me not.

Volp. Alas, my mind’s perturb’d.

Lady P. Why, in such cases, we must cure ourselves,
Make use of our philosophy—

Volp. Oh me!

Lady P. And as we find our passions do rebel,
Encounter them with reason, or divert them,
By giving scope unto some other humour
Of lesser danger: as, in politic bodies,
There’s nothing more doth overwhelm the judgment,
And cloud the understanding, than too much
Settling and fixing, and, as ’twere, subsiding
Upon one object. For the incorporating
Of these same outward things, into that part,
Which we call mental, leaves some certain fæces
That stop the organs, and as Plato says,
Assassinate our knowledge.

Volp. Now, the spirit
Of patience help me!

[Aside.

Lady P. Come, in faith, I must
Visit you more a days; and make you well:
Laugh and be lusty.

Volp. My good angel save me!

[Aside.