Act I Scene — An Apartment in Young Honeywood’s House
Enter Sir William Honeywood, Jarvis
Sir William. Good Jarvis, make no apologies for this honest bluntness. Fidelity like yours is the best excuse for every freedom.
Jarvis. I can’t help being blunt, and being very angry, too, when I hear you talk of disinheriting so good, so worthy a young gentleman as your nephew, my master. All the world loves him.
Sir Will. Say, rather, that he loves all the world; that is his fault.
Jarv. I’m sure there is no part of it more dear to him than you are, tho’ he has not seen you since he was a child.
Sir Will. What signifies his affection to me, or how can I be proud of a place in a heart where every sharper and coxcomb find an easy entrance?
Jarv. I grant you that he’s rather too good natur’d; that he’s too much every man’s man; that he laughs this minute with one, and cries the next with another; but whose instructions may he thank for all this?
Sir Will. Not mine, sure? My letters to him during my employment in Italy taught him only that philosophy which might prevent, not defend his errors.
Jarv. Faith, begging your honour’s pardon, I’m sorry they taught him any philosophy at all; it has only served to spoil him. This same philosophy is a good horse in the stable, but an arrant jade on a journey. For my own part, whenever I hear him mention the name on’t, I’m always sure he’s going to play the fool.
Sir Will. Don’t let us ascribe his faults to his philosophy, I entreat you. No, Jarvis, his good nature rises rather from his fears of offending the importunate, than his desire of making the deserving happy.
Jarv. What it arises from, I don’t know. But to be sure, everybody has it that asks it.
Sir Will. Ay, or that does not ask it. I have been now for some time a concealed spectator of his follies, and find them as boundless as his dissipation.
Jarv. And yet, faith, he has some fine name or other for them all. He calls his extravagance generosity; and his trusting everybody, universal benevolence. It was but last week he went security for a fellow whose face he scarce knew, and that he call’d an act of exalted mu-mu-munificence; ay, that was the name he gave it.
Sir Will. And upon that I proceed, as my last effort, tho’ with very little hopes to reclaim him. That very fellow has just absconded, and I have taken up the security. Now, my intention is to involve him in fictitious distress, before he has plunged himself into real calamity. To arrest him for that very debt, to clap an officer upon him, and then let him see which of his friends will come to his relief.4