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The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton
page 113 of 2094 (05%)
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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