ANTHONY: Alas, good man--among so many of you, some good fellow
should have lent him one!
VINCENT: It needed not, as it happened, uncle. For he found out
such a shift that in his flattering he surpassed us all.
ANTHONY: Why, what said he, cousin?
VINCENT: By our Lady, uncle, not one word. But he did as I believe
Pliny telleth of Apelles the painter, in the picture that he
painted of the sacrifice and death of Iphigenia, in the making of
the sorrowful countenances of the noble men of Greece who beheld
it. He reserved the countenance of King Agamemnon her father for
the last, lest, if he made his visage before, he must in some of
the others afterward either have made the visage less dolorous than
he could, and thereby have forborne some part of his praise, or,
doing the uttermost of his craft, might have happed to make some
other look more heavily for the pity of her pain than her own
father, which would have been yet a far greater fault in his
painting. When he came, therefore, to the making of her father's
face last of all, he had spent out so much of his craft and skill
that he could devise no manner of new heavy cheer and countenance
for him but what he had made there aleady in some of the others a
much more heavy one before. And therefore, to the intent that no
man should see what manner of countenance it was that her father
had, the painter was fain to paint him holding his face in his
handkerchief!
The like pageant (in a manner) played us there this good ancient
honourable flatterer.
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