Page 1199 - Shakespeare - Vol. 1

If to reprove you for this suit of yours,
So season’d with your faithful love to me,
Then, on the other side, I check’d my friends.
Therefore, to speak, and to avoid the first, [150]
And then, in speaking, not to incur the last,
Definitively thus I answer you:
Your love deserves my thanks, but my desert
Unmeritable shuns your high request.
First, if all obstacles were cut away, [155]
And that my path were even to the crown
As the ripe revenue and due of birth,
Yet so much is my poverty of spirit,
So mighty and so many my defects,
That I would rather hide me from my greatness - [160]
Being a bark to brook no mighty sea -
Than in my greatness covet to be hid,
And in the vapour of my glory smother’d.
But, God be thank’d, there is no need of me -
And much I need, to help you, were there need. [165]
The royal tree hath left us royal fruit,
Which, mellow’d by the stealing hours of time,
Will well become the seat of majesty,
And make, no doubt, us happy by his reign.
On him I lay that you would lay on me: [170]
The right and fortune of his happy stars,
Which God defend that I should wring from him.

BUCKINGHAM

My lord, this argues conscience in your Grace;
But the respects thereof are nice and trivial,
All circumstances well considered. [175]
You say that Edward is your brother’s son:
So say we too - but not by Edward’s wife.
For first was he contract to Lady Lucy
(Your mother lives a witness to his vow),
And afterward by substitute betroth’d [180]
To Bona, sister to the King of France.
These both put off, a poor petitioner,
A care-craz’d mother to a many sons,
A beauty-waning and distressed widow,
Even in the afternoon of her best days [185]