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ARCHY:
Ay, the salt-water one: but that of tears and blood
must yet come down, and that of fire follow, if there
be any truth in lies.–The rainbow hung over the city
with all its shops,…and churches, from north to
south, like a bridge of congregated lightning pieced
by the masonry of heaven–like a balance in which the
angel that distributes the coming hour was weighing
that heavy one whose poise is now felt in the lightest
hearts, before it bows the proudest heads under the
meanest feet. 424

QUEEN:
Who taught you this trash, sirrah?

ARCHY:
A torn leaf out of an old book trampled in the dirt.–But
for the rainbow. It moved as the sun moved, and…until
the top of the Tower…of a cloud through its left-hand
tip, and Lambeth Palace look as dark as a rock before
the other. Methought I saw a crown figured upon one tip,
and a mitre on the other. So, as I had heard treasures
were found where the rainbow quenches its points upon
the earth, I set off, and at the Tower– But I shall not
tell your Majesty what I found close to the closet-window
on which the rainbow had glimmered.

KING:
Speak: I will make my Fool my conscience. 435

ARCHY:
Then conscience is a fool.–I saw there a cat caught in
a rat-trap. I heard the rats squeak behind the wainscots:
it seemed to me that the very mice were consulting on the
manner of her death.

QUEEN:
Archy is shrewd and bitter.

ARCHY:
Like the season, 440
So blow the winds.–But at the other end of the rainbow,
where the gray rain was tempered along the grass and
leaves by a tender interfusion of violet and gold in the
meadows beyond Lambeth, what think you that I found
instead of a mitre?

KING:
Vane’s wits perhaps. 445

ARCHY:
Something as vain. I saw a gross vapour hovering in a
stinking ditch over the carcass of a dead ass, some
rotten rags, and broken dishes–the wrecks of what
once administered to the stuffing-out and the ornament
of a worm of worms. His Grace of Canterbury expects to
enter the New Jerusalem some Palm Sunday in triumph on
the ghost of this ass. 451

QUEEN:
Enough, enough! Go desire Lady Jane
She place my lute, together with the music
Mari received last week from Italy,
In my boudoir, and–

[EXIT ARCHY.]

KING:
I’ll go in.

[NOTE:
254-455 For by…I’ll go in 1870; omitted 1824.]

QUEEN:
MY beloved lord, 455
Have you not noted that the Fool of late
Has lost his careless mirth, and that his words
Sound like the echoes of our saddest fears?
What can it mean? I should be loth to think
Some factious slave had tutored him.