The question, then, Lord Hastings, standeth thus

Lord Bardolph
The question, then, Lord Hastings, standeth thus:
Whether our present five-and-twenty thousand
May hold up head without Northumberland.
Lord Hastings
With him we may.
Lord Bardolph
Yea, marry, there’s the point.
But if without him we be thought too feeble,
My judgment is we should not step too far
Till we had his assistance by the hand.

And so, with great imagination
Proper to madmen, led his powers to death
And, winking, leapt into destruction.

For in a theme so bloody-faced as this,
Conjecture, expectation, and surmise
Of aids incertain should not be admitted.
Archbishop 
’Tis very true, Lord Bardolph, for indeed
It was young Hotspur’s cause at Shrewsbury.
Lord Bardolph
It was, my lord; who lined himself with hope,
Eating the air and promise of supply,
Flatt’ring himself in project of a power
Much smaller than the smallest of his thoughts,
And so, with great imagination
Proper to madmen, led his powers to death
And, winking, leapt into destruction.
Hastings
But, by your leave, it never yet did hurt
To lay down likelihoods and forms of hope.
Lord Bardolph
Yes, if this present quality of war —
Indeed the instant action, a cause on foot—
Lives so in hope, as in an early spring
We see th’ appearing buds, which to prove fruit
Hope gives not so much warrant as despair
That frosts will bite them. When we mean to build,
We first survey the plot, then draw the model,
And when we see the figure of the house,
Then must we rate the cost of the erection,
Which if we find outweighs ability,
What do we then but draw anew the model
In fewer offices, or at least desist
To build at all? Much more in this great work,
Which is almost to pluck a kingdom down
And set another up, should we survey
The plot of situation and the model,
Consent upon a sure foundation,
Question surveyors, know our own estate,
How able such a work to undergo,
To weigh against his opposite. Or else
We fortify in paper and in figures,
Using the names of men instead of men,
Like one that draws the model of an house
Beyond his power to build it, who, half through,
Gives o’er and leaves his part-created cost
A naked subject to the weeping clouds
And waste for churlish winter’s tyranny.