. Please your worship, good father, yonder are some would speak
with you.

SIR RADERIC'S PAGE.
What, have they brought me anything? If they have not, say I take
physic. [SIR RADERIC'S _voice within_.] Forasmuch, fiddlers, as I am of
the peace, I must needs love all weapons and instruments that are for
the peace, among which I account your fiddles, because they can neither
bite nor scratch. Marry, now, finding your fiddles to jar, and knowing
that jarring is a cause of breaking the peace, I am, by the virtue of
my office and place, to commit your quarrelling fiddles to close
prisonment in their cases. [_The fiddlers call within_.] Sha ho!
Richard! Jack!

AMORETTO'S PAGE.
The fool within mars our play without. Fiddlers, set it on my head. I
use to size my music, or go on the score for it: I'll pay it at the
quarter's end.

SIR RADERIC'S PAGE.
Farewell, good Pan! sweet Thamyras,[132] adieu! Dan Orpheus, a thousand
times farewell!

JACK FIDDLERS.
You swore you would pay us for our music.

SIR RADERIC'S PAGE.
For that I'll give Master Recorder's law, and that is this: there is a
double oath--a formal oath and a material oath; a material oath cannot
be broken, the formal oath may be broken. I swore formally. Farewell,
fiddlers.

PHILOMUSUS.
Farewell, good wags, whose wits praiseworth I deem,
Though somewhat waggish; so we all have been.

STUDIOSO.
Faith, fellow-fiddlers, here's no silver found in this place; no, not so
much as the usual Christmas entertainment of musicians, a black jack of
beer and a Christmas pie.

[_They walk aside from their fellows_.

PHILOMUSUS.
Where'er we in the wide world playing be,
Misfortune bears a part, and mars our melody;
Impossible to please with music's strain,
Our heart-strings broke are, ne'er to be tun'd again.

STUDIOSO.
Then let us leave this baser fiddling trade;
For though our purse should mend, our credits fade.

PHILOMUSUS.
Full glad am I to see thy mind's free course.
Declining from this trencher-waiting trade.
Well, may I now disclose in plainer guise
What erst I meant to work in secret wise;
My busy conscience check'd my guilty soul,
For seeking maintenance by base vassalage;
And then suggested to my searching thought
A shepherd's poor, secure, contented life,
On which since then I doated every hour,
And meant this same hour in [a] sadder plight,
To have stol'n from thee in secrecy of night.

STUDIOSO.
Dear friend, thou seem'st to wrong