king
from them all they had laid up in store to live on for many years:

"Quae nequeunt secum ferre aut abducere, perdunt;
Et cremat insontes turba scelesta casas . . .
Muris nulla fides, squalent populatibus agri."

["What they cannot bear away, they spoil; and the wicked mob burn
harmless houses; walls cannot secure their masters, and the fields
are squalid with devastation."
--Ovid, Trist., iii. 10, 35; Claudianus, In Eutyop., i. 244.]

Besides this shock, I suffered others: I underwent the inconveniences
that moderation brings along with it in such a disease: I was robbed on
all hands; to the Ghibelline I was a Guelph, and to the Guelph a
Ghibelline; one of my poets expresses this very well, but I know not
where it is.

["So Tories called me Whig, and Whigs a Tory."--Pope, after Horace.]

The situation of my house, and my friendliness with my neighbours,
presented me with one face; my life and my actions with another. They
did not lay formal accusations to my charge, for they had no foundation
for so doing; I never hide my head from the laws, and whoever would have
questioned me, would have done himself a greater prejudice than me; they
were only mute suspicions that were whispered about, which never want
appearance in so confused a mixture, no more than envious or idle heads.
I commonly myself lend a hand to injurious presumptions that fortune
scatters abroad against me, by a way I have ever had of evading to
justify, excuse, or explain myself; conceiving that it were to compromise
my conscience to plead in its behalf:

"Perspicuitas enim argumentatione elevatur;"

["For perspicuity is lessened by argument."
("The clearness of a cause is clouded by argumentation.")
--Cicero, De Nat. Deor., iii. 4.]

and, as if every one saw as clearly into me as I do myself, instead of
retiring from an accusation, I step up to meet it, and rather give it
some kind of colour by an ironical and scoffing confession, if I do not
sit totally mute, as of a thing not worth my answer. But such as look
upon this kind of behaviour of mine as too haughty a confidence, have as
little kindness for me as they who interpret the weakness of an
indefensible cause; namely, the great folks, towards whom want of
submission is the great fault, harsh towards all justice that knows and
feels itself, and is not submissive humble, and suppliant; I have often