them but when they be at home can
help to supply the ordinary want of the kitchen with a number of delicate
dishes of their own devising, wherein the Portuguese is their chief
counsellor, as some of them are most commonly with the clerk of the
kitchen, who useth (by a trick taken up of late) to give in a brief
rehearsal of such and so many dishes as are to come in at every course
throughout the whole service in the dinner or supper while, which bill
some do call a memorial, others a billet, but some a fillet, because such
are commonly hanged on the file and kept by the lady or gentlewoman unto
some other purpose. But whither am I digressed?

I might finally describe the large allowances in offices and yearly
liveries, and thereunto the great plenty of gold and silver plate, the
several pieces whereof are commonly so great and massive, and the quantity
thereof so abundantly serving all the household, that (as I suppose)
Cinyras, Croesus, and Crassus had not the like furniture; nay, if Midas
were now living and once again put to his choice, I think he could ask no
more, or rather not half so much as is there to be seen and used. But I
pass over to make such needless discourses, resolving myself that even in
this also, as in all the rest, the exceeding mercy and loving kindness of
God doth wonderfully appear towards us, in that he hath so largely endued
us with these his so ample benefits.

In some great princes' courts beyond the seas, and which even for that
cause are likened unto hell by divers learned writers that have spent a
great part of their time in them, as Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, one (for
example) who in his epistle _Ad aulicum quendam_, saith thus--

"_An non in inferno es amice, qui es in aula, ubi daemonum habitatio
est, qui illic suis artibus humana licet effigie regnant, atque ubi
scelerum schola est, et animarum jactura ingens, ac quicquid uspiam
est perfidae ac doli, quicquid crudelitatis et inclementiae quicquid
effraenatae superbiae et rapacis avariciae quicquid obscenae libidinis,
faedissimae impudicitiae, quicquid nefandae impietatis et norum
pessimorum, totum illic acervatur cumulatissime ubi strupra, raptus,
incestus, adulteria, principum et nobilium ludi sunt ubi fastus et
tumor, ira, livor, foedaque cupido cum sociis suis imperavit, ubi,
criminum omnium procellae virtutumque omnium inenarrabile
naufragium_," etc.

In such great princes