emulations, frequent invitations, losses, suretyship, sickness, death of
friends, and that which is the gulf of all, improvidence, ill husbandry,
disorder and confusion, by which means they are drenched on a sudden in
their estates, and at unawares precipitated insensibly into an inextricable
labyrinth of debts, cares, woes, want, grief, discontent and melancholy
itself.

I have done with families, and will now briefly run over some few sorts and
conditions of men. The most secure, happy, jovial, and merry in the world's
esteem are princes and great men, free from melancholy: but for their
cares, miseries, suspicions, jealousies, discontents, folly and madness, I
refer you to Xenophon's Tyrannus, where king Hieron discourseth at large
with Simonides the poet, of this subject. Of all others they are most
troubled with perpetual fears, anxieties, insomuch, that as he said in
[707]Valerius, if thou knewest with what cares and miseries this robe were
stuffed, thou wouldst not stoop to take it up. Or put case they be secure
and free from fears and discontents, yet they are void [708]of reason too
oft, and precipitate in their actions, read all our histories, _quos de
stultis prodidere stulti_, Iliades, Aeneides, Annales, and what is the
subject?

"Stultorum regum, et populorum continet aestus."

"The giddy tumults and the foolish rage
Of kings and people."

How mad they are, how furious, and upon small occasions, rash and
inconsiderate in their proceedings, how they dote, every page almost will
witness,