Thomas Bastard

Age is deformed, youth unkind, We scorn their bodies, they our mind.

Nature which headlong into life doth throw us, With our feet forward to our grave doth bring us, What is less ours, than this our borrowed breath, We stumble into life, we go to death.

Our vice runs beyond all that old men saw, And far authentically above our laws, And scorning virtues safe and golden mean, Sits uncontrolled upon the high extreme. Circes, thy monsters painted out the hue, Of feigned filthiness, but ours is true. Our vice puts down all proverbs and all themes, Our vice excels all fables and all dreams.

Methinks 'tis pretty sport to hear a child, Rocking a word in mouth yet undefiled. The tender racket rudely plays the sound, Which weakly banded cannot back rebound, And the soft air the softer roof does kiss, With a sweet dying and a pretty miss, Which hears no answer yet from the white rank Of teeth, not risen from their coral bank. The alphabet is searched for letters soft, To try a word before it can be wrought, And when it slides forth, it goes as nice, As when a man does walk upon the ice.

God’s name is bare of honour in our hearing, And even worn out with our blasphemous swearing. Between the infant and the aged, both The first and last they utter, is an oath. Oh hellish manners of our profane age. Jehovah’s fear is scoffed upon the stage, The Mimicking jester, names it every day; Unless God is blashphem’d, it is no play.

Upon the plain as I rode all alone, Assaulted by two sturdy lads I was; I am a poor man Sires, let me be gone. Nay, but ye shall be poor before ye pass. And so I was: yet lost nothing thereby. Would they had robbed me of my poverty.

Sextus upon a spleen, did rashly swear, That no new fashion he would ever wear. He was forsworn, for see what did ensue, He wore the old, till the old was the new.

Fishing, if I a fisher may protest, Of pleasures is the sweetest, of sports the best, Of exercises the most excellent. Of recreations the most innocent. But now the sport is marred, and what, ye, why? Fishes decrease, and fishers multiply.

Misus and Mopsa hardly could agree, Striving about superiority. The text which says that man and wife are one, Was the chief argument they stood upon. She held they both one woman should become, He held both should be man, and both but one. So they contended daily, but the strife Could not be ended, till both were one wife.

Our fathers did but use the world before, And having used did leave the same to us. We spill whatever resteth to their store. What can our heirs inherit but our curse? For we have sucked the sweet and sap away, And sowed consumption in the fruitful ground; The woods and forests clad in rich array With nakedness and baldness we confound. We have defaced the lasting monuments, And caused all honour to have end with us; The holy temples feel our ravishments. What can our heirs inherit but our curse? The world must end, for men are so accurst; Unless God end it sooner, they will first.