Our state employs. He's gone: and being gone,
I dare tell you, whom I dare better trust,
That our night-eyed Tiberius doth not see
His minion's drifts; or, if he do, he's not
So arrant subtile, as we fools do take him;
To breed a mungrel up, in his own house,
With his own blood, and, if the good gods please,
At his own throat, flesh him, to take a leap.
I do not beg it, heaven; but if the fates
Grant it these eyes, they must not wink.

Lep.
They must
Not see it, Lucius.

Arr. Who should let them?

Lep.
Zeal,
And duty: with the thought he is our prince.

Arr.
He is our monster: forfeited to vice
So far, as no rack'd virtue can redeem him.
His loathed person fouler than all crimes:
An emperor, only in his lusts. Retired,
From all regard of his own fame, or Rome's,
Into an obscure island; where he lives
Acting his tragedies with a comic face,
Amidst his route of Chaldees: spending hours,
Days, weeks, and months, in the unkind abuse
Of grave astrology, to the bane of men,
Casting the scope of men's nativities,
And having found aught worthy in their fortune,
Kill, or precipitate them in the sea,
And boast, he can mock fate. Nay, muse not: these
Are far from ends of evil, scarce degrees.
He hath his slaughter-house at Capreae;
Where he doth study murder, as an art;
And they are dearest in his grace, that can
Devise the deepest tortures. Thither, too,
He hath his boys, and beauteous girls ta'en up
Out of our noblest houses, the best form'd,
Best nurtured, and most modest; what's their good,
Serves to provoke his bad. Some are allured,
Some threaten'd; others, by their friends detained,
Are ravish'd hence, like captives, and, in sight
Of their most grieved parents, dealt away
Unto his spintries, sellaries, and slaves,
Masters of strange and new commented lusts,
For which wise nature hath not left a name.
To this (what most strikes us, and bleeding Rome)
He is, with all his craft, become the ward
To his own vassal, a stale catamite:
Whom he, upon our low and suffering necks,
Hath raised from excrement to side the gods,
And have his proper sacrifice in Rome:
Which Jove beholds, and yet will sooner rive
A senseless oak with thunder than his trunk!----