DUCHESS. Is he mad too?
SERVANT. Pray, question him. I 'll leave you.
[Exeunt Servant and Madmen.]
BOSOLA. I am come to make thy tomb.
DUCHESS. Ha! my tomb!
Thou speak'st as if I lay upon my death-bed,
Gasping for breath. Dost thou perceive me sick?
BOSOLA.
Yes, and the more dangerously, since thy sickness is insensible.
DUCHESS. Thou art not mad, sure: dost know me?
BOSOLA. Yes.
DUCHESS. Who am I?
BOSOLA. Thou art a box of worm-seed, at best but a salvatory<115>
of green mummy.<116> What 's this flesh? a little crudded<117> milk,
fantastical puff-paste. Our bodies are weaker than those paper-
prisons boys use to keep flies in; more contemptible, since ours
is to preserve earth-worms. Didst thou ever see a lark in a cage?
Such is the soul in the body: this world is like her little turf
of grass, and the heaven o'er our heads like her looking-glass, only
gives us a miserable knowledge of the small compass of our prison.
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