Meeting two such wealsmen as you are (I cannot call you Lycurguses), if the drink you give me touch my palate adversely, I make a crooked face at it. I [cannot] say your worships have deliver'd the matter well, when I find the ass in compound with the major part of your syllables; and though I must be content to bear with those that say you are reverend grave men, yet they lie deadly that tell you have good faces. If you see this in the map of my microcosm, follows it that I am known well enough too? What harm can your beesom conspectuities glean out of this character, if I be known well enough too?

BRU. Come, sir, come, we know you well enough.

MEN. You know neither me, yourselves, nor any thing. You are ambitious for poor knaves' caps and legs. You wear out a good wholesome forenoon in hearing a cause between an orange-wife and a forset-seller, and then rejourn the controversy of threepence to a second day of audience. When you are hearing a matter between party and party, if you chance to be pinch'd with the colic, you make faces like mummers, set up the bloody flag against all patience, and in roaring for a chamber-pot, dismiss the controversy bleeding, the more entangled by your hearing. All the peace you make in their cause is calling both the parties knaves. You are a pair of strange ones.

BRU. Come, come, you are well understood to be a perfecter giber for the table than a necessary bencher in the Capitol.

MEN. Our very priests must become mockers if they shall encounter such ridiculous subjects as you are. When you speak best unto the purpose, it is not worth the wagging of your beards, and your beards deserve not so honorable a grave as to stuff a botcher's cushion, or to be entomb'd in an ass's pack-saddle. Yet you must be saying Martius is proud; who, in a cheap estimation, is worth all your predecessors since Deucalion, though peradventure some of the best of 'em were hereditary hangmen. God-den to your worships; more of your conversation would infect my brain, being the herdsmen of the beastly plebeians. I will be bold to take my leave of you.

 

Brutus and Sicinius [go] aside.

 

Enter Volumnia, Virgilia, and Valeria.

How now, my as fair as noble ladies – and the moon, were she earthly, no nobler – whither do you follow your eyes so fast?

VOL. Honorable Menenius, my boy Martius approaches. For the love of Juno, let's go.

MEN. Ha? Martius coming home?

VOL. Ay, worthy Menenius, and with most prosperous approbation.

MEN. Take my cap, Jupiter, [tosses it up] and I thank thee. Hoo! Martius coming home?

TWO LADIES [VIR., VAL.] Nay, 'tis true.

VOL. Look, here's a letter from him; the state hath another, his wife another, and, I think, there's one at home for you.

MEN. I will make my very house reel to-night. A letter for me?

VIR. Yes certain, there's a letter for you, I saw't.

MEN. A letter for me! it gives me an estate of seven years' health, in which time I will make a lip at the physician. The most sovereign prescription in Galen is but empiricutic, and, to this preservative, of no better report than a horse-drench. Is he not wounded? he was wont to come home wounded.

VIR. O no, no, no.

VOL.