wolf is comforted by its howl, the sheep by its wool, the forest by its
finch, woman by her love, and the philosopher by his epiphonema." Ursus
at a pinch composed comedies, which, in recital, he all but acted; this
helped to sell the drugs. Among other works, he had composed an heroic
pastoral in honour of Sir Hugh Middleton, who in 1608 brought a river to
London. The river was lying peacefully in Hertfordshire, twenty miles
from London: the knight came and took possession of it. He brought a
brigade of six hundred men, armed with shovels and pickaxes; set to
breaking up the ground, scooping it out in one place, raising it in
another--now thirty feet high, now twenty feet deep; made wooden
aqueducts high in air; and at different points constructed eight hundred
bridges of stone, bricks, and timber. One fine morning the river entered
London, which was short of water. Ursus transformed all these vulgar
details into a fine Eclogue between the Thames and the New River, in
which the former invited the latter to come to him, and offered her his
bed, saying, "I am too old to please women, but I am rich enough to pay
them"--an ingenious and gallant conceit to indicate how Sir Hugh
Middleton had completed the work at his own expense.

Ursus was great in soliloquy. Of a disposition at once unsociable and
talkative, desiring to see no one, yet wishing to converse with some
one, he got out of the difficulty by talking to himself. Any one who has
lived a solitary life knows how deeply seated monologue is in one's
nature. Speech imprisoned frets to find a vent. To harangue space is an
outlet. To speak out aloud when alone is as it were to have a dialogue
with the divinity which is within. It was, as is well known, a custom of
Socrates; he declaimed to himself. Luther did the same. Ursus took after
those great men. He had the hermaphrodite faculty of being his own
audience. He questioned himself, answered himself, praised himself,
blamed himself. You heard him in the street soliloquizing in his van.