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Touch. Truly, the tree yields bad fruit.

Ros. I’ll graff it with you, and then I shall graff it with a medlar. Then it will be the earliest fruit i’ th’ country; for you’ll be rotten ere you be half ripe, and that’s the right virtue of the medlar.

Touch. You have said; but whether wisely or no, let the forest judge.

Enter Celia with a writing.

Ros.

Peace,

Here comes my sister reading, stand aside.

Cel. [Reads.]

“Why should this [a] desert be?

For it is unpeopled? No!

Tongues I’ll hang on every tree,

That shall civil sayings show:

Some, how brief the life of man

Runs his erring pilgrimage,

That the stretching of a span

Buckles in his sum of age;

Some, of violated vows

’Twixt the souls of friend and friend;

But upon the fairest boughs,

Or at every sentence end,

Will I ‘Rosalinda’ write,

Teaching all that read to know

The quintessence of every sprite

Heaven would in little show.

Therefore heaven Nature charg’d

That one body should be fill’d

With all graces wide-enlarg’d.

Nature presently distill’d