Love for Love | Page 5

I waited upon a
gentleman at Cambridge. Pray what was that Epictetus?
VAL. A very rich man.--Not worth a groat.
JERE. Humph, and so he has made a very fine feast, where there is
nothing to be eaten?
VAL. Yes.
JERE. Sir, you're a gentleman, and probably understand this fine
feeding: but if you please, I had rather be at board wages. Does your
Epictetus, or your Seneca here, or any of these poor rich rogues, teach
you how to pay your debts without money? Will they shut up the
mouths of your creditors? Will Plato be bail for you? Or Diogenes,
because he understands confinement, and lived in a tub, go to prison for
you? 'Slife, sir, what do you mean, to mew yourself up here with three
or four musty books, in commendation of starving and poverty?
VAL. Why, sirrah, I have no money, you know it; and therefore resolve

to rail at all that have. And in that I but follow the examples of the
wisest and wittiest men in all ages, these poets and philosophers whom
you naturally hate, for just such another reason; because they abound in
sense, and you are a fool.
JERE. Ay, sir, I am a fool, I know it: and yet, heaven help me, I'm poor
enough to be a wit. But I was always a fool when I told you what your
expenses would bring you to; your coaches and your liveries; your
treats and your balls; your being in love with a lady that did not care a
farthing for you in your prosperity; and keeping company with wits that
cared for nothing but your prosperity; and now, when you are poor,
hate you as much as they do one another.
VAL. Well, and now I am poor I have an opportunity to be revenged on
them all. I'll pursue Angelica with more love than ever, and appear
more notoriously her admirer in this restraint, than when I openly
rivalled the rich fops that made court to her. So shall my poverty be a
mortification to her pride, and, perhaps, make her compassionate the
love which has principally reduced me to this lowness of fortune. And
for the wits, I'm sure I am in a condition to be even with them.
JERE. Nay, your condition is pretty even with theirs, that's the truth
on't.
VAL. I'll take some of their trade out of their hands.
JERE. Now heaven of mercy continue the tax upon paper. You don't
mean to write?
VAL. Yes, I do. I'll write a play.
JERE. Hem! Sir, if you please to give me a small certificate of three
lines--only to certify those whom it may concern, that the bearer hereof,
Jeremy Fetch by name, has for the space of seven years truly and
faithfully served Valentine Legend, Esq., and that he is not now turned
away for any misdemeanour, but does voluntarily dismiss his master
from any future authority over him -

VAL. No, sirrah; you shall live with me still.
JERE. Sir, it's impossible. I may die with you, starve with you, or be
damned with your works. But to live, even three days, the life of a play,
I no more expect it than to be canonised for a muse after my decease.
VAL. You are witty, you rogue. I shall want your help. I'll have you
learn to make couplets to tag the ends of acts. D'ye hear? Get the maids
to Crambo in an evening, and learn the knack of rhyming: you may
arrive at the height of a song sent by an unknown hand, or a
chocolate-house lampoon.
JERE. But, sir, is this the way to recover your father's favour? Why, Sir
Sampson will be irreconcilable. If your younger brother should come
from sea, he'd never look upon you again. You're undone, sir; you're
ruined; you won't have a friend left in the world if you turn poet. Ah,
pox confound that Will's coffee-house: it has ruined more young men
than the Royal Oak lottery. Nothing thrives that belongs to't. The man
of the house would have been an alderman by this time, with half the
trade, if he had set up in the city. For my part, I never sit at the door
that I don't get double the stomach that I do at a horse race. The air
upon Banstead-Downs is nothing to it for a whetter; yet I never see it,
but the spirit of famine appears to me, sometimes like a decayed porter,
worn out with pimping, and carrying billet doux and songs: not like
other porters, for hire, but for the jests' sake. Now like a thin chairman,
melted down to half his proportion, with carrying a poet upon tick, to
visit some great fortune; and his