very bounty as folly,
that liberality as profuseness, though it had shewn itself folly in
nothing so truly as in the selection of such unworthy creatures as
themselves for its objects. Now was Timon's princely mansion forsaken,
and become a shunned and hated place, a place for men to pass by,
not a place as formerly where every passenger must stop and taste of
his wine and good cheer; now instead of being thronged with feasting
and tumultuous guests, it was beset with impatient and clamorous
creditors, usurers, extortioners, fierce and intolerable in their
demands, pleading bonds, interest, mortgages, iron-hearted men that
would take no denial nor putting off, that Timon's house was now
his jail, where he could not pass, nor go in nor out for them; one
demanding his due of fifty talents, another bringing in a bill of five
thousand crowns, which if he would tell out his blood by drops, and
pay them so, he had not enough in his body to discharge, drop by drop.

In this desperate and irremediable state (as it seemed) of his
affairs, the eyes of all men were suddenly surprised at a new and
incredible lustre which this setting sun put forth. Once more lord
Timon proclaimed a feast, to which he invited his accustomed guests,
lords, ladies, all that was great or fashionable in Athens. Lords
Lucius and Lucullus came, Ventidius, Sempronius, and the rest. Who
more sorry now than these fawning wretches, when they found (as they
thought) that lord Timon's poverty was all pretence, and had been
only put on to make trial of their loves, to think that they should
not have seen through the artifice at the time, and have had the
cheap credit of obliging his lordship? yet who more glad to find the
fountain of that noble bounty, which they had thought dried up, still
fresh and running? They came dissembling, protesting, expressing
deepest sorrow and shame, that when his lordship sent to them, they
should have been so unfortunate as to want the present means to oblige
so honourable a friend. But Timon begged them not to give such trifles
a thought, for he had altogether forgotten it. And these base fawning
lords, though they had denied him money in his adversity, yet
could not refuse their presence at this new blaze of his returning
prosperity. For the swallow follows not summer more willingly than men
of these dispositions follow the good fortunes of the great, nor more
willingly leaves winter than these shrink from the first appearance