ambassadors had stayed a day among them, and saw so vast a quantity of
gold in their houses (which was as much despised by them as it was
esteemed in other nations), and beheld more gold and silver in the chains
and fetters of one slave than all their ornaments amounted to, their
plumes fell, and they were ashamed of all that glory for which they had
formed valued themselves, and accordingly laid it aside--a resolution
that they immediately took when, on their engaging in some free discourse
with the Utopians, they discovered their sense of such things and their
other customs. The Utopians wonder how any man should be so much taken
with the glaring doubtful lustre of a jewel or a stone, that can look up
to a star or to the sun himself; or how any should value himself because
his cloth is made of a finer thread; for, how fine soever that thread may
be, it was once no better than the fleece of a sheep, and that sheep, was
a sheep still, for all its wearing it. They wonder much to hear that
gold, which in itself is so useless a thing, should be everywhere so much
esteemed that even man, for whom it was made, and by whom it has its
value, should yet be thought of less value than this metal; that a man of
lead, who has no more sense than a log of wood, and is as bad as he is
foolish, should have many wise and good men to serve him, only because he
has a great heap of that metal; and that if it should happen that by some
accident or trick of law (which, sometimes produces as great changes as
chance itself) all this wealth should pass from the master to the meanest
varlet of his whole family, he himself would very soon become one of his
servants, as if he were a thing that belonged to his wealth, and so were
bound to follow its fortune! But they much more admire and detest the
folly of those who, when they see a rich man, though they neither owe him
anything, nor are in any sort dependent on his bounty, yet, merely
because he is rich, give him little less than divine honours, even though
they know him to be so covetous and base-minded that, notwithstanding all
his wealth, he will not part with one farthing of it to them as long as