The play opens with an elderly gentleman, in a spangled dressing-gown, who
commences business by telling us the time of day, poetically clapping a
wig upon the sun, by saying, he
"Shakes day about, like perfume from his _hair_,"
which statement bears out the after sentence, that "the wisdom he endures
is terrible!" An Austrian gentleman--whose dress made us at first mistake
him for Richard III. on his travels--arrives to inform the gentleman _en
deshabille_--no other than _Cardinal Martinuzzi_ himself--that he has come
from King Ferdinand, to ask if he will be so good as to give up some
regency; which the Cardinal, however, respectfully declines doing. A
gentleman from Warsaw is next announced, and _Castaldo_ retires, having
incidentally declared a passion for the reigning queen of Hungary.
Mr. Selby, as _Rupert_ from Warsaw, then appears, in a dress most
correctly copied from the costume of the knave of clubs. Being a Pole, he
stirs up the Cardinal vigorously enough to provoke some exceedingly
intemperate language, chiefly by bringing to his memory a case of
child-stealing, to which _Martinuzzi_ was, before he had quite sown his
wild oats, _particeps criminis_. This case having got into the papers
(which _Rupert_ had preserved), the Cardinal wants to obtain them, but
offers a price not long enough for the Pole, who, declaring that
_Martinuzzi_ carries it "too high" to be trusted with them, vanishes.
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