VER. What, talk you to me of living within my bounds? I tell you none
but asses live within their bounds: the silly beasts, if they be put in
a pasture, that is eaten bare to the very earth, and where there is
nothing to be had but thistles, will rather fall soberly to those
thistles and be hunger-starv'd, than they will offer to break their
bounds; whereas the lusty courser, if he be in a barren plot, and spy
better grass in some pasture near adjoining, breaks over hedge and
ditch, and to go, ere he will be pent in, and not have his bellyful.
Peradventure, the horses lately sworn to be stolen,[31] carried that
youthful mind, who, if they had been asses, would have been yet extant.
WILL SUM. Thus, we may see, the longer we live the more we shall learn:
I ne'er thought honesty an ass till this day.
VER. This world is transitory; it was made of nothing, and it must to
nothing: wherefore, if we will do the will of our high Creator, whose
will it is that it pass to nothing, we must help to consume it to
nothing. Gold is more vile than men: men die in thousands and ten
thousands, yea, many times in hundred thousands, in one battle. If then
the best husband has been so liberal of his best handiwork, to what end
should we make much of a glittering excrement, or doubt to spend at a
banquet as many pounds as he spends men at a battle? Methinks I honour
_Geta_, the Roman emperor, for a brave-minded fellow; for he commanded a
banquet to be made him of all meats under the sun, which were served in
after the order of the alphabet, and the clerk of the kitchen, following
the last dish, which was two miles off from the foremost, brought him an
index of their several names.
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