NAN: Now, room for fresh gamesters, who...

NAN: Now, room for fresh gamesters, who do will you to know,

They do bring you neither play, nor university show;

And therefore do entreat you, that whatsoever they rehearse,

May not fare a whit the worse, for the false pace of the verse.

If you wonder at this, you will wonder more ere we pass,

For know, here is inclosed the soul of Pythagoras,

That juggler divine, as hereafter shall follow;

Which soul, fast and loose, sir, came first from Apollo,

And was breath'd into Aethalides; Mercurius his son,

Where it had the gift to remember all that ever was done.

From thence it fled forth, and made quick transmigration

To goldy-lock'd Euphorbus, who was killed in good fashion,

At the siege of old Troy, by the cuckold of Sparta.

Hermotimus was next (I find it in my charta)

To whom it did pass, where no sooner it was missing

But with one Pyrrhus of Delos it learn'd to go a fishing;

And thence did it enter the sophist of Greece.

From Pythagore, she went into a beautiful piece,

Hight Aspasia, the meretrix; and the next toss of her

Was again of a whore, she became a philosopher,

Crates the cynick, as it self doth relate it:

Since kings, knights, and beggars, knaves, lords and fools gat it,

Besides, ox and ass, camel, mule, goat, and brock,

In all which it hath spoke, as in the cobler's cock.

But I come not here to discourse of that matter,

Or his one, two, or three, or his greath oath, BY QUATER!

His musics, his trigon, his golden thigh,

Or his telling how elements shift, but I

Would ask, how of late thou best suffered translation,

And shifted thy coat in these days of reformation.

AND: Like one of the reformed, a fool, as you see,

Counting all old doctrine heresy.

NAN: But not on thine own forbid meats hast thou ventured?

AND: On fish, when first a Carthusian I enter'd.

NAN: Why, then thy dogmatical silence hath left thee?

AND: Of that an obstreperous lawyer bereft me.

NAN: O wonderful change, when sir lawyer forsook thee!

For Pythagore's sake, what body then took thee?

AND: A good dull mule.

NAN: And how! by that means

Thou wert brought to allow of the eating of beans?

AND: Yes.

NAN: But from the mule into whom didst thou pass?

AND: Into a very strange beast, by some writers call'd an ass;

By others, a precise, pure, illuminate brother,

Of those devour flesh, and sometimes one another;

And will drop you forth a libel, or a sanctified lie,

Betwixt every spoonful of a nativity pie.

NAN: Now quit thee, for heaven, of that profane nation;

And gently report thy next transmigration.

AND: To the same that I am.

NAN: A creature of delight,

And, what is more than a fool, an hermaphrodite!

Now, prithee, sweet soul, in all thy variation,

Which body would'st thou choose, to keep up thy station?

AND: Troth, this I am in: even here would I tarry.

NAN: 'Cause here the delight of each sex thou canst vary?

AND: Alas, those pleasures be stale and forsaken;

No, 'tis your fool wherewith I am so taken,

The only one creature that I can call blessed:

For all other forms I have proved most distressed.

NAN: Spoke true, as thou wert in Pythagoras still.

This learned opinion we celebrate will,

Fellow eunuch, as behoves us, with all our wit and art,

To dignify that whereof ourselves are so great and special a part.

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