📔 Volpone

O, sir, 'tis past the scotomy;

[W]here ere I come, / I love to be considerative; and, 'tis true, / I have, at my free houres, thought upon / Some certaine Goods, unto the State of Venice, / Which I do call my Cautions: […]

He would have sold his part of paradise / For ready money, had he met a cope-man.

subject to the petulancy of every vernaculous orator

And am asham'd you' should ha' no more forehead / Than thus to be the patron, or St. George, / To a lewd harlot, a base fricatrice, / A female devil, in a male outside

You will not be acknown, sir; why, 'tis wise. / Thus do all gamesters, at all games, dissemble: / No man will seem to win.

As for those that will (by faults which charity hath raked up, or common honesty concealed) make themselves a name with the multitude, or, to draw their rude and beastly claps, care not whose living faces they intrench with their petulant styles, may they do it without a rival, for me! I choose rather to live graved in obscurity, than share with them in so preposterous a fame. Nor can I blame the wishes of those severe and wise patriots, who providing the hurts these licentious spirits may do in a state, desire rather to see fools and devils, and those antique relics of barbarism retrieved, with all other ridiculous and exploded follies, than behold the wounds of private men, of princes and nations