Page 2811 - Shakespeare - Vol. 3

We do it not alone, sir.

MENENIUS
I know you can do very little alone, for your helps are many, or else your
actions would grow wondrous single. Your abilities are too infant-like for [35]
doing much alone. You talk of pride. O that you could turn your eyes toward
the napes of your necks, and make but an interior survey of your good selves!

O that you could!

BOTH
What then, sir?

MENENIUS
Why, then you should discover a brace of [40] unmeriting, proud, violent,
testy magistrates − alias fools − as any in Rome.

SICINIUS
Menenius, you are known well enough too.

MENENIUS

I am known to be a humorous patrician, and one that loves a cup of hot wine
with not a drop of allaying Tiber in’t; said to be something imperfect in [45]
favouring the first complaint, hasty and tinder-like upon too trivial motion;
one that converses more with the buttock of the night than with the forehead
of the morning. What I think I utter, and spend my malice in [50] my breath.

Meeting two such wealsmen as you are − I cannot call you Lycurguses − if
the drink you give me touch my palate adversely, I make a crooked face at it.
I cannot say your worships have delivered the matter well, when I find the

ass in compound with the major [55] part of your syllables. And though I
must be content to bear with those that say you are reverend grave men, yet
they lie deadly that tell you have good faces. If you see this in the map of my
microcosm, follows it that I am known well enough too? What harm can your
bisson [60] conspectuities glean out of this character, if I be known well

enough too?

BRUTUS
Come, sir, come, we know you well enough.