yet while they barely dream
of vast mountains of wealth, they are as happy as if their imaginary
fancies commenced real truths; some put on the best side outermost, and
starve themselves at home to appear gay and splendid abroad; one with
an open-handed freedom spends all he lays his fingers on; another with
a logic-fisted gripingness catches at and grasps all he can come within
the reach of; one apes it about in the streets to court popularity;
another consults his ease, and sticks to the confinement of a
chimney-corner; many others are tugging hard at law for a trifle, and
drive on an endless suit, only to enrich a deferring judge, or a knavish
advocate; one is for new-modelling a settled government; another is for
some notable heroical attempt; and a third by all means must travel a
pilgrim to Rome, Jerusalem, or some shrine of a saint elsewhere, though
he have no other business than the paying of a formal impertinent visit,
leaving his wife and children to fast, while he himself forsooth is gone
to pray.

[Illustration: 234]

In short, if (as Lucian fancies Menippus to have done heretofore,) any
man could now again look down from the orb of the moon, he would see
thick swarms as it were of flies and gnats, that were quarrelling with
each other, justling, fighting, fluttering, skipping, playing, just new
produced, soon after decaying, and then immediately vanishing; and it
can scarce be thought how many tumults and tragedies so inconsiderate a
creature as man does give occasion to, and that in so short a space as
the small span of life; subject to so many casualties, that the sword,
pestilence, and other epidemic accidents, shall many times sweep away
whole thousands at a brush.

[Illustration: 238]

But hold; I should but expose myself too far, and incur the guilt of
being roundly laughed at, if I proceed to enumerate the several kinds
of the folly of the vulgar. I shall confine therefore my following
discourse only to such as challenge the repute of wisdom, and seemingly
pass for men of the soundest intellectuals. Among whom the Grammarians
present themselves in the front, a sort of men who would be the most
miserable, the most slavish, and the most hateful of all persons, if
I did not in some way alleviate the pressures and miseries of their
profession by blessing them with a bewitching sort of madness: for they
are not only liable to those five curses, which they so oft recite from
the first five verses of H