f Master
Chapman's,[15] began with the dogs and the mules, and afterwards crope
up into the breasts of men.

_Sir Oliver_.--I call such treatment barbarous; their troopers will not
let the gentlemen come with me into the house, but insist on sitting
down to dinner with them. And yet, having brought them out of their
colleges, these brutal half-soldiers must know that they are fellows.

_Oliver_.--Yea, of a truth are they, and fellows well met. Out of their
superfluities they give nothing to the Lord or his Saints; no, not even
stirrup or girth, wherewith we may mount our horses and go forth against
those who thirst for our blood. Their eyes are fat, and they raise not
up their voices to cry for our deliverance.

_Sir Oliver_.--Art mad? What stirrups and girths are hung up in college
halls and libraries? For what are these gentlemen brought hither?

_Oliver_.--They have elected me, with somewhat short of unanimity, not
indeed to be one of themselves, for of that distinction I acknowledge
and deplore my unworthiness, nor indeed to be a poor scholar, to which,
unless it be a very poor one, I have almost as small pretension, but
simply to undertake awhile the heavier office of burser for them, to
cast up their accounts; to overlook the scouring of their plate; and to
lay a list thereof, with a few specimens, before those who fight the
fight of the Lord, that his Saints, seeing the abasement of the proud
and the chastisement of worldlymindedness, may rejoice.

_Sir Oliver_.--I am grown accustomed to such saints and such rejoicings.
But, little could I have thought, threescore years ago, that the hearty
and jovial people of England would ever join in so filching and stabbing
a jocularity. Even the petticoated torch-bearers from rotten Rome, who
lighted the faggots in Smithfield some years before, if more blustering
and cocksy, were less bitter and vulturine. They were all intolerant,
but they were not all hypocritical; they had not always "_the Lord_" in
their mouths.

_Oliver_.--According to their own notions, they might have had at an
outlay of a farthing.

_Sir Oliver_.--Art facetious, Nol? for it is as hard to find that out as
any thing else in thee, only it makes thee look, at times, a little the
grimmer and sourer.

But, regarding these gentlemen from Cambridge. Not being such as, by
their habits and professions, could have opposed you in the field, I
hold it unmilitary and unmanly to put them under any restrai