Scene I.

Love for Love

by William Congreve

VALENTINE in his chamber reading. JEREMY waiting.

Several books upon the table.

VALENTINE
Jeremy.

JEREMY
Sir?

VALENTINE
Here, take away. I'll walk a turn and digest what
I have read.

JEREMY
You'll grow devilish fat upon this paper diet.
[Aside, and taking away the books.]

VALENTINE
And d'ye hear, go you to breakfast. There's a
page doubled down in Epictetus, that is a feast for an emperor.

JEREMY
Was Epictetus a real cook, or did he only write
receipts?

VALENTINE
Read, read, sirrah, and refine your appetite;
learn to live upon instruction; feast your mind and mortify your
flesh; read, and take your nourishment in at your eyes; shut up your
mouth, and chew the cud of understanding. So Epictetus advises.

JEREMY
O Lord! I have heard much of him, when I waited upon
a gentleman at Cambridge. Pray what was that Epictetus?

VALENTINE
A very rich man.--Not worth a groat.

JEREMY
Humph, and so he has made a very fine feast, where
there is nothing to be eaten?

VALENTINE
Yes.

JEREMY
Sir, you're a gentleman, and probably understand this
fine feeding: but if you please, I had rather be at board wages.
Does your Epictetus, or your Seneca here, or any of these poor rich
rogues, teach you how to pay your debts without money? Will they
shut up the mouths of your creditors? Will Plato be bail for you? Or
Diogenes, because he understands confinement, and lived in a tub, go
to prison for you? 'Slife, sir, what do you mean, to mew yourself up
here with three or four musty books, in commendation of starving and
poverty?

VALENTINE
Why, sirrah, I have no money, you know it; and
therefore resolve to rail at all that have. And in that I but follow
the examples of the wisest and wittiest men in all ages, these poets
and philosophers whom you naturally hate, for just such another
reason; because they abound in sense, and you are a fool.

JEREMY
Ay, sir, I am a fool, I know it: and yet, heaven
help me, I'm poor enough to be a wit. But I was always a fool when I
told you what your expenses would bring you to; your coaches and your
liveries; your treats and your balls; your being in love with a lady
that did not care a farthing for you in your prosperity; and keeping
company with wits that cared for nothing but your prosperity; and
now, when you are poor, hate you as much as they do one another.

VALENTINE
Well, and now I am poor I have an opportunity to
be revenged on them all. I'll pursue Angelica with more love than
ever, and appear more notoriously her admirer in this restraint, than
when I openly rivalled the rich fops that made court to her. So
shall my poverty be a mortification to her pride, and, perhaps, make
her compassionate the love which has principally reduced me to this
lowness of fortune. And for the wits, I'm sure I am in a condition
to be even with them.

JEREMY
Nay, your condition is pretty even with theirs,
that's the truth on't.

VALENTINE
I'll take some of their trade out of their
hands.

JEREMY
Now heaven of mercy continue the tax upon paper. You
don't mean to write?

VALENTINE
Yes, I do. I'll write a play.

JEREMY
Hem! Sir, if you please to give me a small
certificate of three lines--only to certify those whom it may
concern, that the bearer hereof, Jeremy Fetch by name, has for the
space of seven years truly and faithfully served Valentine Legend,
Esq., and that he is not now turned away for any misdemeanour, but
does voluntarily dismiss his master from any future authority over
him -

VALENTINE
No, sirrah; you shall live with me still.

JEREMY
Sir, it's impossible. I may die with you, starve
with you, or be damned with your works. But to live, even three
days, the life of a play, I no more expect it than to be canonised
for a muse after my decease.

VALENTINE
You are witty, you rogue. I shall want your help.
I'll have you learn to make couplets to tag the ends of acts. D'ye
hear? Get the maids to Crambo in an evening, and learn the knack of
rhyming: you may arrive at the height of a song sent by an unknown
hand, or a chocolate-house lampoon.

JEREMY
But, sir, is this the way to recover your father's
favour? Why, Sir Sampson will be irreconcilable. If your younger
brother should come from sea, he'd never look upon you again. You're
undone, sir; you're ruined; you won't have a friend left in the world
if you turn poet. Ah, pox confound that Will's coffee-house: it has
ruined more young men than the Royal Oak lottery. Nothing thrives
that belongs to't. The man of the house would have been an alderman
by this time, with half the trade, if he had set up in the city. For
my part, I never sit at the door that I don't get double the stomach
that I do at a horse race. The air upon Banstead-Downs is nothing to
it for a whetter; yet I never see it, but the spirit of famine
appears to me, sometimes like a decayed porter, worn out with
pimping, and carrying billet doux and songs: not like other porters,
for hire, but for the jests' sake. Now like a thin chairman, melted
down to half his proportion, with carrying a poet upon tick, to visit
some great fortune; and his fare to be paid him like the wages of
sin, either at the day of marriage, or the day of death.

VALENTINE
Very well, sir; can you proceed?

JEREMY
Sometimes like a bilked bookseller, with a meagre
terrified countenance, that looks as if he had written for himself,
or were resolved to turn author, and bring the rest of his brethren
into the same condition. And lastly, in the form of a worn-out punk,
with verses in her hand, which her vanity had preferred to
settlements, without a whole tatter to her tail, but as ragged as one
of the muses; or as if she were carrying her linen to the paper-mill,
to be converted into folio books of warning to all young maids, not
to prefer poetry to good sense, or lying in the arms of a needy wit,
before the embraces of a wealthy fool.