consideration he will promise for other gamesters, especially
when they were at it so high, as he intimates not only to have
been in use, but to be like enough to come about again. Wherefore
say I, let them throw with boxes, for unless we will be below the
politics of an ordinary, there is no such bar to cogging. it is
known to his lordship that our game is most at a throw, and that
every cast of our dice is in our suffrages, nor will he deny that
partiality in a suffrage is downright cogging.

If the Venetian boxes be the most sovereign of all remedies
against this same cogging, is it not a strange thing that they
should be thrown first into the fire by a fair gamester? Men are
naturally subject to all kinds of passions; some you have that
are not able to withstand the brow of an enemy, and others that
make nothing of this, are less proof against that of a friend. So
that if your suffrage be barefaced, I dare say you shall not have
one fair cast in twenty. But whatever a man's fortune be at the
box, he neither knows whom to thank, nor whom to challenge.
Wherefore (that my lord may have a charitable opinion of the
choice affection which I confess to have, above all other
beauties, for that of incomparable Venice) there is in this way
of suffrage no less than a demonstration that it is the most
pure, and the purity of the suffrage in a popular government is
the health, if not the life of it, seeing the soul is not
otherwise breathed into the sovereign power than by the suffrage
of the people. Wherefore no wonder if Postellus be of opinion
that this use of the ball is the very same with that of the bean
in Athens, or that others, by the text concerning Eldad and
Medad, derive it from the Commonwealth of Israel. There is
another thing, though not so material to us, that my lord will