Charity would be quite banished from such a world--for men are born to
relieve and assist one another; and in their stead should succeed and be
introduced Defiance, Disdain, and Rancour, with the most execrable troop of
all evils, all imprecations, and all miseries. Whereupon you will think,
and that not amiss, that Pandora had there spilt her unlucky bottle. Men
unto men will be wolves, hobthrushers, and goblins (as were Lycaon,
Bellerophon, Nebuchodonosor), plunderers, highway robbers, cutthroats,
rapparees, murderers, poisoners, assassinators, lewd, wicked, malevolent,
pernicious haters, set against everybody, like to Ishmael, Metabus, or
Timon the Athenian, who for that cause was named Misanthropos, in such
sort that it would prove much more easy in nature to have fish entertained
in the air and bullocks fed in the bottom of the ocean, than to support or
tolerate a rascally rabble of people that will not lend. These fellows, I
vow, do I hate with a perfect hatred; and if, conform to the pattern of
this grievous, peevish, and perverse world which lendeth nothing, you
figure and liken the little world, which is man, you will find in him a
terrible justling coil and clutter. The head will not lend the sight of
his eyes to guide the feet and hands; the legs will refuse to bear up the
body; the hands will leave off working any more for the rest of the
members; the heart will be weary of its continual motion for the beating of
the pulse, and will no longer lend his assistance; the lungs will withdraw
the use of their bellows; the liver will desist from convoying any more
blood through the veins for the good of the whole; the bladder will not be
indebted to the kidneys, so that the urine thereby will be totally stopped.
The brains, in the interim, considering this unnatural course, will fall
into a raving dotage, and withhold all feeling from the sinews and motion
from the muscles. Briefly, in such a world without order and array, owing
nothing, lending nothing, and borrowing nothing, you would see a more
dangerous conspiration than that which Aesop exposed in his Apologue. Such
a world will perish undoubtedly; and not only perish, but perish very