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Let boys hoot at me, and trulls and drabs pluck me by the beard! What can they? It is I, myself, who hold the scorpion whip! 'Tis memory! What! Envy, rage, revenge, hatred, rape and murder, all possessing one man? Poor creature! Poor creature! Pity him, Fairfax! Pity? Ask pity? Despise him! Trample on him! Spit in his face! Frank Henley to Oliver Trenchard London, Grosvenor Street

From the pinnacle of a great faith in his kind he had been hurled headlong to the depths of unbelief and suspicion. He had seen Loyalty mocked and betrayed; starving Intelligence bought with a price by crime-opulent Ignorance; naked Virtue crouched shivering in the shadow of exalted, ermined Vice; the sots and trulls of bestial Sensuality deified and worshiped in the public places.

There was bad blood between them at first, says Mr Vincent, and the lord Harry called farmer Nicholas all the old Nicks in the world and an old whoremaster that kept seven trulls in his house and I'll meddle in his matters, says he. I'll make that animal smell hell, says he, with the help of that good pizzle my father left me.

It must be confessed, indeed, that the lady in the fine garments is the civiller of the two; but I warrant neither of them are a bit better than they should be. A couple of Bath trulls, I'll answer for them; your quality don't ride about at this time o' night without servants."

All wandering minstrels, sharping peddlers, sturdy trulls, and other camp trumpery were ordered to pack up their baggage, and were drummed out of the gates of Alhama. In place of such lewd rabble he introduced a train of holy friars to inspirit his people by exhortation and prayer and choral chanting, and to spur them on to fight the good fight of faith.

"It was not a brace of goat-herds last night, Excellency, but a roomful of brigands and their trulls in the Golden Fish. The worst company in Verona, Excellency the most brazen, the most case-hardened. But the story is the same from their mouths as from the lads'; not a detail is wanting; not one point gives the lie to another. Excellency, I would bow to your wit in any case but this.

Presently he remarked: "We are not far from what I am looking for." And he turned up a side street to our right. As we took turn after turn each street was less savory and more disreputable than the last till we were in a sort of alley populated it seemed by slatternly trulls and trollops. "This," said Agathemer, "is the quarter of the town I am after, but not quite the part of it I want."

I have often observed these rascals sneaking from gentlemen's doors with wallets or hats' full of good victuals, which they either carry to their trulls, or sell for a trifle.

Thus none could see their noses, and they laughed without fear both at fortune and the fortunate; neither more nor less than our ladies laugh at barefaced trulls when they have those mufflers on which they call masks, and which were formerly much more properly called charity, because they cover a multitude of sins.

And he knows not what to say of their doublets, with pendant pieces on the breast full of jags and cuts; their "galligascons," to make their dresses stand out plumb round; their farthingales and divers colored stockings. "I have met," he says, "with some of these trulls in London so disguised that it hath passed my skill to determine whether they were men or women."