No More Learning

It is a barbarous envy, to take from
those men's virtues which, because thou canst not arrive at, thou
impotently despairest to imitate. Is it a crime in me that I know that
which others had not yet known but from me? or that I am the author of
many things which never would have come in thy thought but that I taught
them? It is new but a foolish way you have found out, that whom you
cannot equal or come near in doing, you would destroy or ruin with evil
speaking; as if you had bound both your wits and natures 'prentices to
slander, and then came forth the best artificers when you could form the
foulest calumnies.

_Nil gratius protervo lib_. --Indeed nothing is of more credit or request
now than a petulant paper, or scoffing verses; and it is but convenient
to the times and manners we live with, to have then the worst writings
and studies flourish when the best begin to be despised. Ill arts begin
where good end.

_Jam literae sordent_. --_Pastus hodiern. ingen_. --The time was when men
would learn and study good things, not envy those that had them. Then
men were had in price for learning; now letters only make men vile. He
is upbraidingly called a poet, as if it were a contemptible nick-name:
but the professors, indeed, have made the learning cheap--railing and
tinkling rhymers, whose writings the vulgar more greedily read, as being
taken with the scurrility and petulancy of such wits. He shall not have
a reader now unless he jeer and lie. It is the food of men's natures;
the diet of the times; gallants cannot sleep else.
The writer must lie
and the gentle reader rests happy to hear the worthiest works
misinterpreted, the clearest actions obscured, the innocentest life
traduced: and in such a licence of lying, a field so fruitful of
slanders, how can there be matter wanting to his laughter? Hence comes
the epidemical infection; for how can they escape the contagion of the
writings, whom the virulency of the calumnies hath not staved off from
reading?

_Sed seculi morbus_. --Nothing doth more invite a greedy reader than an
unlooked-for subject. And what more unlooked-for than to see a person of
an unblamed life made ridiculous or odious by the artifice of lying? But
it is the disease of the age; and no wonder if the world, growing old,
begin to be infirm: old age itself is a disease. It is long since the
sick world began to dote and talk idly: would she had but doted still!
but her dotage is now broke forth into a madness, and become a mere
frenzy.

_Alastoris malitia_. --This Alastor, who hath left nothing unsearched or
unassailed by his impudent and licentious lying in his aguish writings
(for he was in his cold quaking fit all the while), what hath he done
more than a troublesome base cur? barked and made a noise afar off; had a
fool or two to spit in his mouth, and cherish him with a musty bone? But
they are rather enemies of my fame than me, these barkers.

_Mali Choragi fuere_. --It is an art to have so much judgment as to apparel
a lie well, to give it a good dressing; that though the nakedness would
show deformed and odious, the suiting of it might draw their readers.
Some love any strumpet, be she never so shop-like or meretricious, in
good clothes. But these, nature could not have formed them better to
destroy their own testimony and overthrow their calumny.