Page:Elizabethan & Jacobean Pamphlets.djvu/243

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Thomas Dekker
223

horses dyed of it: But now (thankes to folly) it is held the onely rare phisicke, and the purest golden Asses liue vpon it.

As for the dyet of that Saturnian age, it was like their attire, homely: A sallad, and a messe of leeke porridge, was a dinner for a farre greater man then euer the Turke was: Potato-pies, and Custards, stood like the sinfull suburbs of Cookery, and had not a wall (so much as a handfull hie) built rownd about them. There were no daggers then, nor no Chayres. Crookes his ordinary, in those parsimonious dayes, had not a Capons-leg to throw at a dog. Oh golden world, the suspicious Venecian carued not his meate with a siluer pitch-forke, neither did the sweet-toothd Englishman shift a dozen of trenchers at one meale. Peirs ploughman layd the cloth, and Simplicity brought in the voyder. How wonderfully is the world altered? and no maruell, for it has lyein sicke almost fiue thousand yeares: So that it is no more like the old Theater du munde, than old Paris garden is like the Kings garden at Paris.

What an excellent workeman therefore were he that could cast the Globe of it into a new mould: And not to make it look like Mullineux his Globe, with a round face sleekt and washt ouer with whites of egges; but to haue it in Plano, as it was at first, with all the ancient circles, lines, paralels, and figures, representing indeede, all the wrinckles, crackes,