catalogue of your employments, now! O, no, I err; you have the
marshalling of all the ghosts too that pass the Stygian ferry, and
I suspect you for a share with the old sculler there, if the truth
were known; but let that scape. One other peculiar virtue you
possess, in lifting, or leiger-du-main, which few of the house of
heaven have else besides, I must confess. But, methinks, that
should not make you put that extreme distance 'twixt yourself and
others, that we should be said to "over-dare" in speaking to your
nimble deity. So Hercules might challenge priority of us both,
because he can throw the bar farther, or lift more join'd stools at
the arm's end, than we. If this might carry it, then we, who have
made the whole body of divinity tremble at the twang of our bow,
and enforc'd Saturnius himself to lay by his curled front, thunder,
and three-fork'd fires, and put on a masking suit, too light for a
reveller of eighteen to be seen in --

MER. How now! my dancing braggart in decimo sexto! charm your
skipping tongue, or I'll --

CUP. What! use the virtue of your snaky tip staff there upon us?

MER. No, boy, but the smart vigour of my palm about your ears.
You have forgot since I took your heels up into air, on the very
hour I was born, in sight of all the bench of deities, when the
silver roof of the Olympian palace rung again with applause of
the fact.

CUP. O no, I remember it freshly, and by a particular instance;
for my mother Venus, at the same time, but stoop'd to embrace you,
and, to speak by metaphor, you borrow'd a girdle of her's, as you