Template:Dsh a lot of learning
Queen: Hark: a clammy ditch. How deep!
Nuncle: And yet with our temper’d syllogies
We dig it deeper by the minute.
Queen: And behold: fair Triago —
Nuncle: Of open’d mouth and mind,
Well-endowed to drop right in it.
Enter Triago popping his head out of the ditch muttering to himself
Triago: Who wouldst die, wouldst die therein about it?
Queen: How now, Triago?
How fares thy latest batty postulation?
Triago: Most promising, Majesty.
I have it ratified that wren’s eggs,
Broken thus, betray yet unacknowledged villainy.
Queen: How so, Professor?
Triago: Experimental rigour, Ma’am. Nothing less:
A hundred men, detained at your pleasure, were took
And each one bid to strike an egg against a pan.
Every wren’s egg broke. The lot. Not one exception!
Nuncle: Pray, give me air!
Queen: What provenance the eggs?
Triago: I bid each man poach one from the mother’s nest:
Insurance that their hearts were indubitably black.
Queen: Poor Mrs. Wren must be furious!
Nuncle: Not quite so wild as is this correlation spurious.
Triago: Ho, Ho.
Let not thy witty fool, nor his foolish wit
Besmirch the fruited science of th’ academy.
“A little learning is a dangerous thing” —
Nuncle: Yet not half so dangerous as a lot.
Triago: — So sayeth Pope, you know.
Nuncle: But not the one in Rome:
Queen: Good ser knight: art thou drunk upon the Pierian spring:
A hypoxic draft that suffocates the brain,
So deep no shaft of light can bring it round again?
Triago: My conjecture comports a grain of truth
As pure and true and golden—
Nuncle: — but yet no more roundly causative
Than are the month-past flappings of a Latin papillon
Upon a brewing Filipino typhoon.
Triago: (aside) Yet am I here caught, a spider’s prey
Wrestling ’gainst the sticky silk
And by mine own dim efforts
Binding e’er further to my criminous fate.
In this sinking oubliette of mine devise
Am I enchain’d: alack! There is no gate.
Queen: Is it our plight? So to suffer fools?
Should Cipolla’s curse beset me round with pains?
Nuncle: He who suffers most sees least
But suffers not so much from fools as brains.
Herculio: is this the abyss you wouldst die in?