No More Learning

The treasure of a fool is always in his tongue, said the witty comic
poet; {33c} and it appears not in anything more than in that nation,
whereof one, when he had got the inheritance of an unlucky old grange,
would needs sell it; {33d} and to draw buyers proclaimed the virtues of
it. Nothing ever thrived on it, saith he. No owner of it ever died in
his bed; some hung, some drowned themselves; some were banished, some
starved; the trees were all blasted; the swine died of the measles, the
cattle of the murrain, the sheep of the rot; they that stood were ragged,
bare, and bald as your hand; nothing was ever reared there, not a
duckling, or a goose. _Hospitium fuerat calamitatis_. {34a} Was not
this man like to sell it?

_Vulgi expectatio_. --Expectation of the vulgar is more drawn and held with
newness than goodness; we see it in fencers, in players, in poets, in
preachers, in all where fame promiseth anything; so it be new, though
never so naught and depraved, they run to it, and are taken. Which
shews, that the only decay or hurt of the best men's reputation with the
people is, their wits have out-lived the people's palates. They have
been too much or too long a feast.

_Claritas patriae_. --Greatness of name in the father oft-times helps not
forth, but overwhelms the son; they stand too near one another. The
shadow kills the growth: so much, that we see the grandchild come more
and oftener to be heir of the first, than doth the second: he dies
between; the possession is the third's.

_Eloquentia_. --Eloquence is a great and diverse thing: nor did she yet
ever favour any man so much as to become wholly his. He is happy that
can arrive to any degree of her grace.
Yet there are who prove
themselves masters of her, and absolute lords; but I believe they may
mistake their evidence: for it is one thing to be eloquent in the
schools, or in the hall; another at the bar, or in the pulpit. There is
a difference between mooting and pleading; between fencing and fighting.
To make arguments in my study, and confute them, is easy; where I answer
myself, not an adversary. So I can see whole volumes dispatched by the
umbratical doctors on all sides: but draw these forth into the just
lists: let them appear _sub dio_, and they are changed with the place,
like bodies bred in the shade; they cannot suffer the sun or a shower,
nor bear the open air; they scarce can find themselves, that they were
wont to domineer so among their auditors: but indeed I would no more
choose a rhetorician for reigning in a school, than I would a pilot for
rowing in a pond.

_Amor et odium_. --Love that is ignorant, and hatred, have almost the same
ends: many foolish lovers wish the same to their friends, which their
enemies would: as to wish a friend banished, that they might accompany
him in exile; or some great want, that they might relieve him; or a
disease, that they might sit by him. They make a causeway to their
country by injury, as if it were not honester to do nothing than to seek
a way to do good by a mischief.

_Injuria_. --Injuries do not extinguish courtesies: they only suffer them
not to appear fair. For a man that doth me an injury after a courtesy,
takes not away that courtesy, but defaces it: as he that writes other
verses upon my verses, takes not away the first letters, but hides them.

_Beneficia_. --Nothing is a courtesy unless it be meant us; and that
friendly and lovingly. We owe no thanks to rivers, that they carry our
boats; or winds, that they be favouring and fill our sails; or meats,
that they be nourishing. For these are what they are necessarily.
Horses carry us, trees shade us, but they know it not. It is true, some
men may receive a courtesy and not know it; but never any man received it
from him that knew it not.