Nature is fine in love: and, where 'tis fine,
It sends some precious instance of itself
After the thing it loves.*

265

The effects of Poverty and Riches.

36-iv. 5.

Twinn'd brothers of one womb,—

Whose procreation, residence, and birth,

Scarce is dividant,-touch them with several fortunes; The greater scorns the lesser: Not nature,

To whom all sores lay siege, can bear great fortune, But by contempt of nature.†

Raise me this beggar, and denude that lord;

The senator shall bear contempt hereditary,
The beggar native honour.

It is the pasture lards the browser's sides,
The want that makes him lean.

27-iv. 3.

He, that a fool doth very wisely hit,
Doth very foolishly, although he smart,
Not to seem senseless of the bob: if not,
The wise man's folly is anatomized

Even by the squand'ring glances of the fool.‡

10-ii. 7.

To be generous, guiltless, and of free disposition, is to take those things for bird-bolts, that you deem cannon-bullets. There is no slander in an allowed fool, though he do nothing but rail; nor no railing in a known discreet man, though he do nothing but reprove. 4-i. 5.

*Love is the passion by which nature is most exalted and refined; and as substances refined and subtilized easily obey any impulse, or follow any attraction, some part of nature, so purified and refined, flies off after the attracting object, after the thing it loves.

ti. e. Human nature, besieged as it is by misery, admonished as it is of want and imperfection, when elevated by fortune, will despise beings of nature like its own.

Unless men have the prudence not to appear touched with the sarcasms of a jester, they subject themselves to his power; and the wise man will have his folly anatomized, i.e. dissected and laid open, by the squandering glances or random shots of a fool.

§ Short arrows.

A jest's prosperity lies in the ear

Of him that hears it, never in the tongue
Of him that makes it.

8-v. 2.

None are so surely caught,* when they are catch'd,
As wit turn'd fool: folly, in wisdom hatch'd,
Hath wisdom's warrant, and the help of school;
And wit's own grace to grace a learned fool.
The blood of youth burns not with such excess,
As gravity's revolt to wantonness.
Folly in fools bears not so strong a note,
As foolery in the wise, when wit doth dote;
Since all the power thereof it doth apply,
To prove, by wit, worth in simplicity.

270

Customs, new, heedlessly followed.

New customs,

Though they be never so ridiculous,
Nay, let them be unmanly, yet are follow'd.

Where doth the world thrust forth a vanity, (So it be new, there's no respect how vile,) That is not quickly buzz'd into the ears?

8-v. 2.

25-i. 3.

17-ii. 1.

The great man down, you mark, his favourite flies;
The poor advanced makes friends of enemies.
And hitherto doth love on fortune tend:

For who not needs, shall never lack, a friend;

And who in want a hollow friend doth try,
Directly seasons him his enemy.

36-iii. 2.

Why should a man, whose blood is warm within,
Sit like his grandsire cut in alabaster?

Sleep, when he wakes? and creep into the jaundice
By being peevish?

9-i. 1.

*These are observations worthy of a man who has surveyed hu. man nature with the closest attention.

274

Power, loss of it, is loss of homage.

'Tis certain, greatness, once fallen out with fortune,
Must fall out with men too: What the declined is,
He shall as soon read in the eyes of others,
As feel in his own fall: for men, like butterflies,
Show not their mealy wings, but to the summer;
And not a man, for being simply man,

Hath any honour; but honour for those honours
That are without him, as place, riches, favour,
Prizes of accident as oft as merit:

Which when they fall, as being slippery standers,
The love that lean'd on them as slippery too,
Do one pluck down another, and together
Die in the fall.

275

Love, in its spring and in its maturity.

26-iii. 3.

[ing;

My love is strengthen'd, though more weak in seem-
I love not less, though less the show appear:
That love is merchandised, whose rich esteeming
The owner's tongue doth publish every where.
Our love was new, and then but in the spring,
When I was wont to greet it with my lays;
As Philomel in summer's front doth sing,
And stops his pipe in growth of riper days;
Not that the summer is less pleasant now

Than when her mournful hymns did hush the night,
But that wild music burdens every bough,

And sweets grown common lose their dear delight.

Poems.

Who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law's delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life; But that the dread of something after death,The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn No traveller returns,-puzzles the will; And makes us rather bear those ills we have, Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought;
And enterprises of great pith and moment,
With this regard, their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

36-iii. 1.

What's past, and what's to come, is strew'd with

Minutes, hours, days, weeks, and years,

Pass'd over to the end they were created,

Would bring white hairs unto a quiet grave.

There's nothing serious in mortality:

All is but toys: renown, and grace, is dead.

280

Bad courses.

But by bad courses may be understood,

26-iv. 5.

23-ii. 4.

15-ii. 3.

That their events can never fall out good. 17-ii. 1.

Virtue preserved from fell destruction's blast,

Led on by heaven, and crown'd with joy at last.

282

34-v. 3.

Riches cannot procure happiness for their possessors. The aged man that coffers up his gold,

Is plagued with cramps, and gouts, and painful fits;
And scarce hath eyes his treasure to behold,
But like still-pining Tantalus he sits,
And useless barns the harvest of his wits;
Having no other pleasure of his gain,
But torment that it cannot cure his pain.
So then he hath it, when he cannot use it,
And leaves it to be master'd by his young;
Who in their pride do presently abuse it;
Their father was too weak, and they too strong,
To hold their cursed-blessed fortune long.

The sweets we wish for turned to loathed sours,
Even in the moment that we call them ours.

283

The consequences of evil.

We bid ill be done,

Poems.

When evil deeds have their permissive pass,
And not the punishment.

284

5-i. 4.

Wisdom and Learning.

Study is like the heaven's glorious sun,

That will not be deep search'd with saucy looks;
Small have continual plodders ever won,

Save base authority from others' books.

Over-studiousness.

8-i. 1.

285

Universal plodding prisons up

The nimble spirits in the arteries;

As motion, and long-during action, tires
The sinewy vigour of the traveller.

8-iv. 3.

286 The effects of the want of judgment and taste.

When a man's verses cannot be understood, nor a man's good wit seconded with the forward child, Understanding; it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.

*

10-iii. 3.

287 Affections not felt are disbelieved or despised.
How sometimes nature will betray its folly,
Its tenderness, and make itself a pastime
To harder bosoms!†

13-i. 2.

Cowards father cowards, and base things sire base: Nature hath meal, and bran; contempt, and grace. 31-iv. 2.

* Implies, that the entertainment was mean, and the bill was extravagant. It is said by Rabelais, there was only one quarter of an hour in human life passed ill, and that was between the calling for the reckoning and the paying for it.

† Smith's theory of moral sentiments shows, agreeably to Thucydides, that sentiments, when above the tone of others, reach not their sympathy.