Well, we shall see your cunning: yet if you can change your hair, I pray, do.

 

Enter Albius

 

ALB. Ladies, and lordings, there's a slight banquet stays within for you, please you draw near, and accost it.

JUL. We thank you, good Albius: but when shall we see those excellent jewels you are commended to have?

ALB. At your ladyship's service. Aside. I got that speech by seeing a play last day, and it did me some grace now: I see, 'tis good to collect sometimes; I'll frequent these plays more than I have done, now I come to be familiar with courtiers.

GAL. Why, how now, Hermogenes? What ailest thou, trow?

HER. A little melancholy, let me alone, pray thee.

GAL. Melancholy! How so?

HER. With riding: a plague on all coaches for me.

CHL. Is that hard-favoured gentleman a poet too; Cytheris?

CYT. No; this is Hermogenes, as humorous as a poet though: he is a musician.

CHL. A musician? Then he can sing.

CYT. That he can excellently; did you never hear him?

CHL. Oh no: will he be entreated, think you?

CYT. I know not. Friend, Mistress Chloe would fain hear Hermogenes sing: are you interested in him?

GAL. No doubt, his own humanity will command him so far, to the satisfaction of so fair a beauty; but rather than fail, we'll all be suitors to him.

HER. 'Cannot sing.

GAL. Pray thee, Hermogenes.

HER. 'Cannot sing.

GAL. For honour of this gentlewoman, to whose house I know thou mayest be ever welcome.

CHL. That he shall in truth, sir, if he can sing.

OVI. What's that?

GAL. This gentlewoman is wooing Hermogenes for a song.

OVI. A song? Come, he shall not deny her. Hermogenes?

HER. 'Cannot sing.

GAL. No, the ladies must do it, he stays but to have their thanks acknowledged as a debt to his cunning.

JUL. That shall not want: ourself will be the first shall promise to pay him more than thanks, upon a favour so worthily vouchsafed.

HER.