osing rather to herd with wild
beasts, as more harmless and friendly than man.

What a change from lord Timon the rich, lord Timon the delight of
mankind, to Timon the naked, Timon the manhater! Where were his
flatterers now? Where were his attendants and retinue? Would the bleak
air, that boisterous servitor, be his chamberlain, to put his shirt on
warm? Would those stiff trees, that had outlived the eagle, turn young
and airy pages to him, to skip on his errands when he bade them? Would
the cool brook, when it was iced with winter, administer to him his
warm broths and caudles when sick of an over-night's surfeit? Or would
the creatures that lived in those wild woods, come and lick his hand,
and flatter him?

Here on a day, when he was digging for roots, his poor sustenance, his
spade struck against something heavy, which proved to be gold, a great
heap which some miser had probably buried in a time of alarm, thinking
to have come again and taken it from its prison, but died before
the opportunity had arrived, without making any man privy to the
concealment; so it lay, doing neither good nor harm, in the bowels of
the earth, its mother, as if it had never come from thence, till the
accidental striking of Timon's spade against it once more brought it
to light.

Here was a mass of treasure which if Timon had retained his old mind,
was enough to have purchased him friends and flatterers again; but
Timon was sick of the false world, and the sight of gold was poisonous
to his eyes; and he would have restored it to the earth, but that,
thinking of the infinite calamities which by means of gold happen to
mankind, how the lucre of it causes robberies, oppression, injustice,
briberies, violence and murder, among men, he had a pleasure in
imagining (such a rooted hatred did he bear to his species) that out
of this heap which in digging he had discovered, might arise some
mischief to plague mankind. And some soldiers passing through the
woods near to his cave at that instant, which proved to be a part of
the troops of the Athenian captain Alcibiades, who upon some disgust
taken against the senators of Athens (the Athenians were ever noted to
be a thankless and ungrateful people, giving disgust to their generals
and best friends), was marching at the head of the same triumphant
army which he had formerly headed in their defence, to war against
them; Timon, who liked their business well, bestowed upon their
captain the gold to