the covenant
made betwixt them two, shall be in hope some day to participate of the
prey.

Could the Goths, the Scyths, or Massagets do a worse or more cruel act to
any of the inhabitants of a hostile city, when, after the loss of many of
their most considerable commanders, the expense of a great deal of money,
and a long siege, they shall have stormed and taken it by a violent and
impetuous assault? May not these fathers and mothers, think you, be
sorrowful and heavy-hearted when they see an unknown fellow, a vagabond
stranger, a barbarous lout, a rude cur, rotten, fleshless, putrified,
scraggy, boily, botchy, poor, a forlorn caitiff and miserable sneak, by an
open rapt snatch away before their own eyes their so fair, delicate, neat,
well-behavioured, richly-provided-for and healthful daughters, on whose
breeding and education they had spared no cost nor charges, by bringing
them up in an honest discipline to all the honourable and virtuous
employments becoming one of their sex descended of a noble parentage,
hoping by those commendable and industrious means in an opportune and
convenient time to bestow them on the worthy sons of their well-deserving
neighbours and ancient friends, who had nourished, entertained, taught,
instructed, and schooled their children with the same care and solicitude,
to make them matches fit to attain to the felicity of a so happy marriage,
that from them might issue an offspring and progeny no less heirs to the
laudable endowments and exquisite qualifications of their parents, whom
they every way resemble, than to their personal and real estates, movables,
and inheritances? How doleful, trist, and plangorous would such a sight
and pageantry prove unto them? You shall not need to think that the
collachrymation of the Romans and their confederates at the decease of
Germanicus Drusus was comparable to this lamentation of theirs? Neither
would I have you to believe that the discomfort and anxiety of the
Lacedaemonians, when the Greek Helen, by the perfidiousness of the
adulterous Trojan, Paris, was privily stolen away out of their country, was
greater or more pitiful than this ruthful and deplorable collugency of
theirs? You may very well imagine that Ceres at the ravishment of her
daughter Proserpina was not more attristed, sad, nor mournful than they.
Trust me, and your own reason, that the loss of Osiris was not so
regrettable to Isis, nor did Venus so deplore the death of Adonis, nor y