Racine: Phaedra

THE KNIGHTS i6i
This hurricane will overblow.
Fill the sails and let her go!
Cleon.—I'll indict ye, I'll impeach,
I'll denounce ye in a speech;
With four several accusations.
For your former peculations,
Of a hundred talents each.
Sausage-Seller.—But I'll denounce ye,
And I'll trounce ye,
With accusations half a score;
Half a score, for having left
Your rank in the army ; and for theft
I'll charge ye with a thousand more.
Cleon.—I'll rummage out your pedigree.
And prove that all your ancestry
Were sacrilegious and accurst.-^
Sausage-Seller.— I'll prove the same of yours ; and
The foulest treasons and the worst
Their deep contrivance to conceal
Plots against the common weal
Which I shall publish and declare
first
Publish, and depose, and swear,
Cleon.—Plots, concealed and hidden! Where?
Sausage-Seller.—Where? Where plots have always tried
To hide themselves—beneath a hide!
Cleon.—Go for a paltry vulgar slave.
Sausage-Seller.—Get out for a designing knave.
! Chorus.—Give him back the cuflF you got
Cleon.—Murder ! help ! a plot ! a plot
I'm assaulted and beset!
Chorus.—Strike him harder ! harder yet
Pelt him—rap him,
Slash him—slap him,
Across the chops there, with a wipe
Of your entrails and your tripe!
Keep him down—the day's your own.
O cleverest of human kind ! the stoutest and the boldest,
•• Many of the first families were in- massacre, committed nearly two hun-
Tolved in the g^uilt of a sacrilegious dred years before.