The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton
page 113 of 2094 (05%)
page 113 of 2094 (05%)
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teacheth all his subjects, is a true saying still.
"For Princes are the glass, the school, the book, Where subjects' eyes do learn, do read, do look." ------"Velocius et citius nos Corrumpunt vitiorum exempla domestica, magnis Cum subeant animos auctoribus."------[498] Their examples are soonest followed, vices entertained, if they be profane, irreligious, lascivious, riotous, epicures, factious, covetous, ambitious, illiterate, so will the commons most part be, idle, unthrifts, prone to lust, drunkards, and therefore poor and needy ([Greek: hae penia stasin empoiei kai kakourgian], for poverty begets sedition and villainy) upon all occasions ready to mutiny and rebel, discontent still, complaining, murmuring, grudging, apt to all outrages, thefts, treasons, murders, innovations, in debt, shifters, cozeners, outlaws, _Profligatae famae ac vitae_. It was an old [499]politician's aphorism, "They that are poor and bad envy rich, hate good men, abhor the present government, wish for a new, and would have all turned topsy-turvy." When Catiline rebelled in Rome, he got a company of such debauched rogues together, they were his familiars and coadjutors, and such have been your rebels most part in all ages, Jack Cade, Tom Straw, Kette, and his companions. Where they be generally riotous and contentious, where there be many discords, many laws, many lawsuits, many lawyers and many physicians, it is a manifest sign of a distempered, melancholy state, as [500]Plato long since maintained: for where such kind of men swarm, they will make more work for themselves, and that body politic diseased, which was otherwise sound. A general mischief in these our times, an insensible plague, and |
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