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Yet, being gone, think not on me; I am
A thing too wretched for thy thoughts to name;
But when I die, and wish all comforts given,
I'll think on you, and by you think on Heaven.

COELUM BRITANNICUM:

A

MASQUE1,

AT WHITEHALL, IN THE BANQUETING HOUSE, ON SHROVE-TUESDAY NIGHT, THE 18TH OF FEBRUARY, 1633.

THE INVENTORS,

THOMAS CAREW, INIGO JONES.

Non habet ingenium; Cæsar sed jussit: habebo.
Cur me posse negem, posse quod ille putat.

THE DESCRIPTION OF THE SCENE.

THE first thing that presented itself to the sight was a rich ornament that enclosed the scene; in the upper part of which were great branches of foliage growing out of leaves and husks, with a cornice at the top; and in the midst was placed a large compartiment, composed of grotesque work, wherein were harpies with wings and lions' claws, and their hinder parts converted into leaves and branches.

Over all was a broken frontispiece, wrought with scrowls and masque-heads of children, and within this, a table adorn'd with a lesser compartiment, with this inscription, COELUM BRITANNICUM. The two sides of this ornament were thus ordered: first, from the ground arose a square

Masque. This species of composition was long the favourite of the British court, and even disputed the ground with the regular compositions of the dramatic Muse. Unguided by any rules, unrestrained by any laws, it might wander thro' the universe for objects either new or monstrous, and where it found none it might create them. With these powers, it was well calculated to charm the fancy in the absence of taste; but, as taste established her empire in the minds of men, the Masque, with all its unaccountable monsters, retired.

-It had its birth in Italy, about the 16th century, when it was the fashion for every bard to have a world of his own creation. From whence it migrated, with other exotics, cross the Channel, and found a warm reception in the benevolent soil of Britain. The poets of queen Elizabeth's reign, and of the following age, were pleased with the extravagance of the thing; and as they followed Ariosto and his brethren through all the wildness of Fairyland, they followed them also in this, and almost surpassed heir masters.

basement, and on the plinth 3 stood a great vase of gold, richly enchased, and beautified with sculptures of great relieve4, with fruitages banging from the upper part. At the foot of this sate two youths naked, in their natural colours; each of these with one arm supported the vase, on the cover of which stood two young women in draperies, arm in arm; the one figuring the glory of princes, and the other mansuetude': their other arms bore up an oval, in which, to the king's majesty, was this impress, a lion with an imperial crown on his head; the words, Animum sub pectore forti: On the other side was the like composition, but the design of the figures varied; and in the oval on the top, being borne up by nobility and fecundity, was this impress to the queen's majesty, a lilly growing with branches and leaves, and three lesser lilies springing out of the stem; the words, semper inclyta virtus: all this ornament was heightened with gold, and for the invention, and various composition, was the newest and most gracious that hath been done in this place.

The curtain was watchet and a pale yellow in panes, which, flying up on the sudden, discovered the scene, representing old arches, old palaces, decayed walls, parts of temples, theatres, basilicas' and thermes, with confused heaps of broken columns, bases, cornices, and statues, lying as underground, and altogether resembling the ruins of some great city of the ancient Romans, or civiliz'd Britons. This strange prospect detained the eyes of the spectators some time, when to a loud music Mercury descends. On the upper part of his chariot stands a cock in action of crowing. Hs habit was a coat of flame-colour girt to him, and a white mantle trimm'd with gold and silver: upon his head a wreath with small falls of white feathers, a caducens in his hand, and wings at his heels: being come to the ground, he dismounts, and goes up to the state.

MERCURY.

FROM the high senate of the gods, to you,
Bright glorious twins of love and majesty,
Before whose throne three warlike uations bend
Their willing knees; on whose imperial brows
The regal circle prints no awful frowns
To fright your subjects, but whose calmer eyes
Shed joy and safety on their melting hearts,
That flow with cheerful, loyal reverence;
Come I, Cyllenius, Jove's ambassador,
Not, as of old, to whisper amorous tales
Of wanton love into the glowing ear
Of some choice beauty in this numerous train:

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'Basilicas, in architecture, are public halls with

2 The uppermost member of the entablature of two ranges of pillars, and galleries over them.

: column, or that which crowns the order.

* Baths.

Those days are fled; the rebel flame is quench'd
In heavenly breasts; the gods have sworn by Styx,
Never to tempt yielding mortality

To loose embraces. Your exemplar life
Hath not alone transfus'd a zealous heat
Of imitation through your virtuous court,
By whose bright blaze your palace is become
The envy'd pattern of this under world;
But the aspiring flame hath kindled Heaven:
Th' immortal bosoms burn with emulous fires;
Jove rivals your great virtues, royal sir,
And Juno, madam, your attractive graces;
He his wild lusts, her raging jealousies
She lays aside, and through th' Olympic hall,
As yours doth here, the great example spreads.
And though, of old, when youthful blood conspir'd
With his new empire, prone to heats of lust,
He acted incests, rapes, adulteries,

On earthly beauties, which his raging queen,
Swoln with revengeful fury, turn'd to beasts,
And in despite he transformed to stars,
Till he had fill'd the crowded firmament
With his loose strumpets, and their spurious race,
Where the eternal records of his shame
Shine to the world in flaming characters:
When in the crystal mirror of your reign

He view'd himself, he found his loathsome stains;
And now, to expiate th' infectious guilt
Of those detested luxuries, he'll chase
Th' infamous lights from their usurped sphere,
And drown in the Lethæan flood their curs'd
Both names and memories: in those vacant rooms
First you succeed, and of the wheeling orb,
In the most eminent and conspicuous point,
With dazzling beams and spreading magnitude,
Shine the bright pole-star of this hemisphere.
Next, by your side, in a triumphant chair,
And crown'd with Ariadne's diadem,

Merc. Peace, railer, bridle your licentious tongue, And let this presence teach you modesty.

Mom. Let it, if it can; in the mean time I will acquaint it with my condition. Know, gay people, that though your poets (who enjoy by patent a particular privilege to draw down any of the deities from Twelfth-night to Shrove-Tuesday, at what time there is annually a most familiar intercourse between the two courts) have as yet never invited me to these solemnities, yet it shall appear by my intrusion this night, that I am a very considerable person upon these occasions, and may most properly assist at such entertainments. My name is Momus ap-Somnus ap-Erabus ap-Chaos ap-Demorgorgon ap-Eternity. My offices and titles are, the supreme theomastix, hypercritic of manners, prothonotary of abuses, arch informer, dilator general, universal calumniator, eternal plaintiff, and perpetual foreman of the grand inquest. My privileges are an ubiquitary, circumambulatory, speculatory, interrogatory, redargutory immunity over all the privy lodgings; behind hangings, doors, curtains; through key-holes, chinks, windows; about all venereal lobbies, sconces, or redoubts, though it be to the surprise of a perdu page or chambermaid; in, and at, all courts of civil and criminal judicature, all councils, consultations, and parliamentary assemblies, where though I am but a wool-sack god, and have no vote in the sanction of new laws, I have yet a prerogative of wresting the old to any whatsoever interpretation, whether it be to the behoof or prejudice of Jupiter, his crown, and dignity; for, or against, the rites of either house of patrician or plebeian gods. My natural qualities are to make Jove frown, Juno pout, Mars chafe, Venus blush, Vulcan glow, Saturn quake, Cynthia pale, Phoebus hide his face, and Mercury here take his heels. My recreations are witty mischiefs, as when Satan gelt his father; the smith caught his wife and her bravo in a net of cobweb iron; and Hebe, through the lubricity of the pavement tumbling over the halfspace, presented the emblem of the forked tree, and discovered to the tann'd Ethiops the snowy cliffs of Calabria, with the grotto of Puteolum. But that you may arrive at the perfect knowledge of me, by the familiar illustration of a bird of mine own feather, old Peter Aretine, who reduc'd all the scepters and mitres of that age tributary to his wit, was my parallel, and Frank Rabelais suck'd much of my milk too; but your modern French hospital of oratory is a mere counterfeit, an arrant Mom. By your leave, mortals. Good cousin mountebank; for though, fearing no other fortunes Hermes, your pardon, good my lord ambassador: than his sciatica, he discourses of kings and I found the tables of your arms and titles in every queens with as little reverence as of grooms and inn betwixt this and Olympus, where your present chambermaids, yet he wants their fangteeth and expedition is registered: your nine thousand nine scorpion's tail; I mean that fellow, who, to add to hundred ninty ninth legation. I cannot reach the his stature, thinks it a greater grace to dance on policy why your master breeds so few statesmen; his tip-toes like a dog in a doublet, than to walk it suits not with his dignity, that in the whole Em-like other men on the soles of his feet. pyræum there should not be a god fit to send on these honourable errands but yourself, who are not yet so careful of his honour or your own, as might become your quality, when you are itinerant. The hosts upon the high-way cry out with open mouth upon you, for supporting plafery in your train; which though, as you are the god of petty larceny, you might protect, yet you know it is directly against the new orders, and oppose the reformation in diameter.

Sits the fair consort of your heart and throne;
Diffus'd about you, with that share of light
As they of virtue have deriv'd from you,
He'll fix this noble train of either sex,
So to the British stars this lower globe
Shall owe its light, and they alone dispense
To th' world a pure, refined influence.

Enter Momus attired in a long darkish robe, all wrought over with poniards, serpents, tongues, eyes, and ears; his beard and hair party-coloured, and upon his head a wreath stuck with feathers, and a porcupine in the forepart.

Merc. No more impert'nent trifler; you disturb The great affair with your rude scurrilous chat. What doth the knowledge of your abject state Concern Jove's solemn message?

Mom. Sir, by our favour, though you have a

Lying in wait to watch any thing.

more special commission of employment from Jupiter, and a larger entertainment from his exchequer; yet, as a freeborn god, I have the liberty to travel at mine own charges, without your pass or countenance legatine; and that it may appear, a sedulous, acute observer may know as much as a dull, phlegmatic ambassador, and wears a treble key to unlock the mysterious cyphers of your dark secrecies, I will discourse the politic state of Heaven

to this trim audience..

At this the scene changeth, and in the Heaven is dis-resolution of soliciting businesses in their own percovered a sphere, with stars placed in their several images; borne up by a huge naked figure (only a piec of drapery hanging over his thigh) kneeling and bowing forwards; as if the great weight lying on his shoulders opprest him; upon his head a crown: by all which he might easily be known to be

Atlas.

observed long. Monopolies are called in, sophistication of wares punished, and rates imposed on commodities. Injunctions are gone out to the nectar-brewers, for the purging of the heavenly beverage of a narcotic weed, which hath rendered the ideas confused in the divine intellects, and reducing it to the composition used in Saturn's reign. Edicts are made for the restoring of decayed housekeeping, prohibiting the repair of families to the metropolis; but this did endanger an Amazoniaa mutiny, till the females put on a more masculine sons, and leaving their husbands at home for stallions of hospitality. Bacchus hath commanded all taverns to be shut, and no liquor drawn after ten o'clock at night. Cupid must go no more sʊ scandalously naked, but is enjoined to make him breeches, though of his mother's petticoats. Ganimede is forbidden the bed-chamber, and must only minister in public. The gods must keep no pages, -You shall understand, that Jupiter, upon the nor grooms of their chamber, under the age of inspection of I know not what virtuous precedents twenty-five, and those provided of a competent extant (as they say) here in this court, but, as I stock of beard. Pan may not pipe, nor Proteus more probably guess, out of the consideration of juggle, but by especial permission. Vulcan was the decay of his natural abilities, hath, before a brought to an oretenus and fined, for driving in a frequent convocation of the superlunary peers, in a plate of iron into one of the Sun's chariot-wheels, solemn oration recanted, disclaimed, and utterly and frost-nailing his horses upon the fifth of Novemrenounced all the lacivious extravagancies and ber last, for breach of a penal statute, prohibiting riotous enormities of his forepast licentious life, work upon holidays, that being the annual celebraand taken his oath on Juno's breviary, religiously tion of the gygantomachy 10. In brief, the whole kissing the two-leav'd book, never to stretch his state of the hierarchy suffers a total reformation, limbs more betwixt adulterous sheets; and hath especially in the point of reciprocation of conjugal with pathetical remonstrances exhorted, and under affection. Venus hath confest all her adulteries, strict penalties enjoined, a respective conformity and is receiv'd to grace by her husband, who, conin the several subordinate deities; and because the scious of the great disparity betwixt ber perfections libertines of antiquity, the ribald poets, to perpe- and his deformities, allows those levities as an equal tuate the memory and example of their triumphs counterpoise; but it is the prettiest spectacle to over chastity, to all future imitation, have in their see her stroaking with her ivory hand his collied immortal songs celebrated the martyrdom of those cheeks, and with her snowy fingers combing his strumpets under the persecution of the wives, and sooty beard. Jupiter too begins to learn to lead devolved to posterity the pedigrees of their whores, his own wife; I left him practising in the milky bawds, and bastards: it is therefore by the autho-way; and there is no doubt of an universal rity aforesaid enacted, that this whole army of constellations be immediately disbanded and cashiered, so to remove all imputation of impiety from the celestial spirits, and all lustful influences upon terrestrial bodies, and consequently that there be an inquisition erected to expunge in the ancient, and suppress in the modern and succeeding poems and pamphlets, all past, present, and future mention of those abjur'd heresies, and to take particular notice of all ensuing incontinencies, and punish them in their high commission court. Am not I in election to be a tall statesman, think you, that can repeat a passage thus punctually?

Merc. I shun in vain the importunity
With which this snarler vexeth all the gods;
Jove cannot 'scape him: well, what else from
Heaven?

Mom. Heaven! Heaven is no more the place it was; a cloyster of Carthusians, a monastery of converted gods; Jove is grown old and fearful, apprehends a subversion of his empire, and doubts lest Fate should introduce a legal succession in the legitimate heir, by repossessing the Titanian line; and hence springs all this innovation. We have had new orders read in the presence-chamber, by the vice president of Parnassus, too strict to be

obedience, where the lawgiver himself in his own person observes his decrees so punctually, who besides to eternize the memory of that great example of matrimonial union which he derives from hence, hath on his bed-chamber door and ceiling, fretted with stars, in capital letters, engraven the inscription of Carlo-Maria. This is as much, I am sure, as either your knowledge or instructions can direct you to, which I having in a blunt round tale, without state, formality, politic inferences, or suspected rhetorical elegancies, already delivered, you may now dexterously proceed to the second part of your charge, which is the raking of your heavenly sparks up in the embers, or reducing the etherial lights to their primitive opacity and gross, dark subsistence: they are all unriveted from the sphere, and hang loose in their sockets, where they but attend the waving of your caduce, and immediately they reinvest their pristine shapes, and appear before you in their own natural defor mities.

10 This alludes to the gunpowder plot; and was intended, with the preceding list of all the supposed regulations in heaven, to compliment Charles I and his consort on their temperance, their chastity, their justice, &c.

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Merc. Momus, thou shalt prevail; for since thy | Take human shapes, and the disorder show
Intrusion hath inverted my resolves,
[bold Of thy regressive paces here below.
I must obey necessity, and thus turn
My face to breathe the thunderer's just decree
'Gainst this adulterate sphere, which first I purge
Of loathsome monsters and misshapen forms:
Down from her azure concave, thus I charm
The Lernean Hydra, the rough unlick'd Bear:
The watchful Dragon, the storm-boding Whale,
The Centaur, the horn'd goatfish Capricorn,
The snake-head Gorgon, and fierce Sagittar,
Divested of your gorgeous starry robes,
Fall from the circling orb, and ere you suck
Fresh venom in, measure this happy Earth:
Then to the fens, caves, forests, desarts, seas,
Fly and resume your native qualities.

The second antimasque is danced in retrograde paces,
expressing obliquity in motion.

They dance in those monstrous shapes, the first masque of natural deformity.

11

Mom. This crab, I confess, did ill become the Heavens; but there is another that more infests the Earth, and makes such a solstice in the politer arts and sciences, as they have not been observed for many ages to have made any sensible advance. Could you but lead the learned squadrons, with a masculine resolution, past this point of retrogradation, it were a benefit to mankind, worthy the power of a god, and to be paid with altars; but that not being the work of this night, you may anti-pursue your purposes. What now succeeds?

Mounted the sky, and fix'd his trophies there.
As fawning Flattery in the little dog;
I' th' bigger, churlish Murmur; Cowardice
I' th' timorous hare; Ambition in the eagle;
Rapine and Avarice in th' adventrous ship
That sail'd to Colchos for the golden fleece;
Drunken Distemper in the goblet flows;
I' th' dart and scorpion, biting Calumny;
In Hercules and the lion, furious Rage;
Vain Ostentation in Cassiope:
All these I to eternal exile doom,
But to this place their emblem'd vices summon,
Clad in those proper figures by which best
Their incorporeal nature is exprest.

Merc. Vice, that, unbodied, in the appetite Mom. Are not these fine companions, trim play- Erects his throne, hath yet, in bestial shapes, fellows for the deities? Yet these and their fellows Branded by Nature with the character have made up all our conversation for some thou-And distinct stamp of some peculiar ill, sands of years. Do not you, fair ladies, acknowledge yourselves deeply engaged now to those poets, your servants, that in the height of commendation have rais'd your beauties to a parallel with such exact proportions, or at least rank'd you in their spruce society? Hath not the consideration of these inhabitants rather frighted your thoughts utterly from the contemplation of the place? But now that these heavenly mansions are to be void, you that shall hereafter be found unlodged will become inexcusable; especially since virtue alone shall be sufficient title, fine, and rent: yet if there be a lady not competently stock'd that way, she shall not on the instant utterly despair, if she carry a sufficient pawn of handsomeness; for however the letter of the law runs, Jupiter, notwithstanding his age and present austerity, will never refuse to stamp beauty, and make it current, with his own impression: but to such as are destitute of both I can afford but small encouragement. cousin Mercury. What follows?

Proceed,

Merc. Look up, and mark where the bright zodiac
Hangs like a belt about the breast of Heaven;
On the right shoulder, like a flaming jewel,
His shell with nine rich topazes adorn'd,
Lord of this tropic, sits the skalding Crab:
He, when the Sun gallops in full career
His annual race, his ghastly claws uprear'd,
Frights at the confines of the torrid zone
The fiery team, and proudly stops their course,
Making a solstice; till the fierce steeds learn
His backward paces, and so retrograde,
Post down hill to th' opposed Capricorn.
Thus I depose him from his lofty throne;
Drop from the sky into the briny flood;
There teach thy motion to the ebbing sea;
But let those fires, that beautify'd thy shell,

11 It is a mistake to suppose (as is generally done) that antimasque signifies a kind of half-entertainment, or prelude to the masque itself. The derivation of it is from antick and masque, and it means a dance of such strange and monstrous figures as have no relation to order, uniformity, or even probability.

The third antimasque is danced of these several vices, expressing their deviation from virtue.

Mom. From henceforth it shall be no more said in the proverb, when you would express a riotous assembly, that Hell, but Heaven, is broke loose. This was an arrant goal-delivery; all the prisons of your great cities could not have vomited more corrupt matter. But, cousin Cyllenius, in my judgment it is not safe, that these infectious persons should wander here to the hazard of this island: they threatened less danger when they were nail'd to the firmament. I should conceive it a very discreet course, since they are provided of a tall vessel of their own ready rigg'd, to embark them all together in that good ship called the Argo, and send them to the plantation in New-England, which hath purged more virulent humours from the politic body, than guiacum and all the West-Indian drugs have from the natural bodies of this kingdom. Can you devise how to dispose of them better?

Merc. They cannot breathe this pure and tem-
perate air,

Where Virtue lives, but will with hasty flight,
'Mongst fogs and vapors, seek unsound abodes.
Fly after them from your usurped seats,
You foul remainders of that viperous brood:
Let not a star of a luxurious race
With his loose blaze stain the sky's crystal face.

All the stars are quenched, and the sphere darkened.

Before the entry of every antimasque, the stars in those figures in the sphere which they were to represent, were extinct; so as by the end of the antimasque in the sphere no more stars were seen.

special favour, by these presents to specify and
declare to all our loving people, that it shall be
lawful for any person whatsoever, that conceiveth
him or herself to be really endued with any heroi-
cal virtue or transcendent merit, worthy so high a
calling and dignity, to bring their several pleas
beloved cousin and counseller, Don Mercury, and
and pretences before our right trusty and well-
good Momus, &c. our peculiar delegates for that
affair, upon whom we have transferr'd an absolute
power to conclude, and determine, without appeal
in such cases appear behoveful and expedient.
or revocation, accordingly as to their wisdoms it stall

of the first month, in the first year of the Refor
Given at our palace in Olympus, the first day

Mom. Here is a total eclipse of the eighth sphere, which neither Booker, Allestre, nor any of your prognosticators, no, nor their great master Tycho, were aware of; but yet in my opinion there were some innocent and some generous constellations, that might have been reserved for noble uses: as the scales and sword to adorn the statue of Justice, since she resides here on Earth only in picture and effigy. The eagle had been a fit pre-mation. sent for the Germans, in regard their bird hath mew'd most of her feathers lately. The dolphin too had been most welcome to the French; and then had you but clapt Perseus on his Pegasus, brandishing his sword, the dragon yawning on his back under the horse's fect, with Python's dart through his throat, there had been a divine St. George for this nation: but since you have improvidently shuffled them all together, it rests only that we provide an immediate succession; and to that purpose I will instantly proclaim a free elec-poison hid by providence in the bottom of the seas

tion.

O-yes! O-yes! O-yes!

By the father of the gods,

and the king of men.

Plutus enters, an old man full of wrinkles, a bald head, a thin white beard, spectacles on his nose, with a bunch'd back, and attired in a robe of cloth of gold.

Merc. Who's this appears?

Mom. This is a subterranean fiend, Plutus, in this dialect term'd riches, or the god of gold; a

the universe.

and navel of the earth from man's discovery, where if the seeds begun to sprout above ground, the ecrescence was carefully guarded by dragons; yet, at last, by human curiosity brought to light, their own destruction; this being the true Pandora's Whereas we having observed a very commenda-box, whence issued all those mischiefs that now all ble practice taken into frequent use by the princes of these latter ages, of perpetuating the memory of their famous enterprizes, sieges, battles, victoPlut. That I prevent the message of the gods ries in picture, sculpture, tapestry, embroideries, Thus with my haste, and not attend their summons, and other manufactures, wherewith they have Which ought in justice call me to the place embellished their public palaces; and taken into I now require of right, is not alone our more distinct and serious consideration, the To shew the just precedence that I hold particular Christmas-hanging of the guard-cham- Before all earthly, next th' immortal powers, ber of this court, wherein the naval victory of 88 12 But to exclude the hopes of partial grace is, to the eternal glory of this nation, exactly deli- In all pretenders, who, since I descend neated; and whereas, we likewise, out of a pro-To equal trial, must, by my example, phetical imitation of this so laudable custom, did for many thousand years before, adorn and beautify the eighth room of our celestial mansion, commonly called the star-chamber, with the military adventures, stratagems, achievements, feats and defeats, performed in our own person, whilst yet our standard was erected, and we a combatant in the amorous warfare; it hath notwithstanding, after mature deliberation and long debate, held first in our own inscrutable bosom, and afterwards communicated with our privy-council, seemed meet to our omnipotency, for causes to ourself best known, to furnish and dis-array our fore-said starchamber of all those ancient constellations which have for so many ages been sufficiently notorious, and to admit into their vacent places such persons only as shall be qualified with exemplar virtue and eminent desert, there to shine in indelible characters of glory to all posterity; it is therefore our divine will and pleasure, voluntarily, and out of our own free and proper motion, mere grace, and

12 The defeat of the famous Spanish Armada, which Philip sent against England, and which was completely ruined by queen Elizabeth's fleet, in 1588.

Waving your favour, claim by sole desert.
If Virtue must inherit, she's my slave;
I lead her captive in a golden chain,
About the world: she takes her form and being
From my creation; and those barren seeds
That drop from Heaven, if I not cherish them
With my distilling dews and fotive 12 heat,
They know no vegetation; but, expos'd
To blasting winds of freezing poverty,
Or not shoot forth at all, or, budding, wither.
Should I proclaim the daily sacrifice
Brought to my temples by the toiling rout,
Not of the fat and gore of abject beasts,
But human sweat and blood pour'd on my altars,
I might provoke the envy of the gods.
Turn but your eyes and mark the busy world
Climbing steep mountains for the sparkling stones;
Piercing the center for the shining ore,
And th' ocean's bosom to take pearly sands;
Crossing the torrid and the frozen zones,
'Midst rocks and swallowing gulfs, for gainful trade,
And, through opposing swords, fire, murdering
Scaling the walled towns for precious spoils.

cannon,

12 Nourishing.

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