BEN JONSON 221 Mrs. O. Not anybody but Numps. Cokes. He does not understand. Edg. {Picks Cokes' pocket of his ptirse."] Nor' you feel. {Aside. Gives the purse aside to NiGHT.] In, to Ursia, Nightingale, and carry her comfort : see it told. This fellow [the reverend Justice ! ] was sent to us by Fortune, for our first fairing. {Exit Night. Over. But what speak I of the diseases of the body, children of the Fair ? Cokes. That's to us, sister. Brave, i' faith I Over. Hark, O you sons and daughters of Smithfield I and hear what malady it doth the mind : it causeth swearing, it causeth swaggering, it causeth snuffling and snarling, and now and then a hurt [appalling climax ! ]. Mrs. 0. He hath something of Master Overdo, methinks, brother. Cokes. So methought, sister, very much of my brother Overdo : and 'tis when he speaks. Over. Look into any angle of the town, the Streights or the Bermudas,* where the quarrelling lesson is read, and how do they entertain the time, but with bottle-ale and tobacco ? The lecturer is o' one side, and his pupils o' the other ; but the seconds are still bottle-ale and tobacco, for which the lecturer reads, and the novices pay. Thirty pound a week in bottle-ale ! forty in tobacco 1 and ten more in ale again ! Then for a suit to drink in, so much, and, that being slavered, so much for another suit, and then a third suit, and a fourth suit ! and still the bottle-ale slavereth, and the tobacco stinketh ! Waspe. Heart of a madman ! are you rooted here ? will you never away? what can any man find out in this bawling fellow, to grow here for ? . . .
- " These Streights consisted of a nest of obscure courts, alleys,
and avenues, running between the bottom of St. Martin's Lane, Half-moon (now Bedford Street), and Chandos Street. In Justice Overdo' s time they were the receptacle of fraudulent debtors, thieves, and prostitutes. ... At a subsequent period this clus- ter of avenues exchanged the old name of the Bermudas for that of the Caribee Islands, which the learned professors of the district corrupted, by a happy allusion to the arts cultivated there, into the Cribbee Islands, their present appellation." — Gifford, in i8i6.
