Love is merely a madness, and, I tell you,
deserves as well a dark house and a whip
as madmen do: and the reason why they are not
so punished and cured is that the lunacy is so
ordinary that the whippers are in love too. Yet I profess
curing it by council. I have cured one so, and in this
manner. He was to imagine me his love, his mistress;
and I set him every day to woo me; at which time
would I, being but a moonish youth, grieve, be effeminate,
changeable, longing and liking, proud, fantastical, apish,
shallow, inconstant, full of tears, full of smiles, for
every passion something and for no passion truly
anything, as boys and women are for the most part
cattle of this colour; would now like him, now loathe
him; then entertain him, then forswear him; now weep
for him, then spit at him; that I drave my suitor from
his mad humour of love to a living humour of madness;
which was, to forswear the full stream of the world and
to live in a nook merely monastic. And thus I cured
him; and this way will I take upon me to wash your
liver as clean as a sound sheep's heart, that there
shall not be one spot of love in't.