To Sir Henry Wotton: here's no more News than Virtue; I May as Well by John Donne

Here's no more news than virtue; I may as well / Tell you Calais, or Saint Michael's tales, as tell / That vice doth here habitually dwell.

Yet as, to get stomachs, we walk up and down, / And toil to sweeten rest; so, may God frown, / If, but to loathe both, I haunt court or town.

For, here, no one is from th' extremity / Of vice by any other reason free, / But that the next to him still's worse than he.

In this world's warfare, they whom rugged Fate / (God's commissary) doth so throughly hate, / As in the court's squadron to marshal their state;

If they stand arm'd with silly honesty, / With wishes, prayers, and neat integrity, / Like Indians 'gainst Spanish hosts they be.

Suspicious boldness to this place belongs, / And to have as many ears as all have tongues; / Tender to know, tough to acknowledge wrongs.

Believe me, sir, in my youth's giddiest days, / When to be like the court was a play's praise, / Plays were not so like courts, as courts like plays.

Then let us at these mimic antics jest, / Whose deepest projects and egregious gests / Are but dull morals of a game at chests.

But now 'tis incongruity to smile, / Therefore I end; and bid farewell awhile; / "At court,"-though "from court" were the better style.