e will,
Weary with graving in blind characters
And figures of familiar beasts and plants,
Invented letters to write lies withal.
In them he penn'd the fables of the gods,
The giants' war, and thousand tales besides.
After each nation got these toys in use[107]
There grew up certain drunken parasites,
Term'd poets, which, for a meal's meat or two.
Would promise monarchs immortality.
They vomited in verse all that they knew;
Feign'd causes and beginnings of the world;
Fetch'd pedigrees of mountains and of floods
From men and women whom the gods transform'd.
If any town or city they pass'd by
Had in compassion (thinking them madmen)
Forborne to whip them, or imprison them,
That city was not built by human hands;
'Twas rais'd by music, like Megara walls:
Apollo, poets' patron, founded it,
Because they found one fitting favour there.
Musaeus, Linus, Homer, Orpheus,
Were of this trade, and thereby won their fame.

WILL SUM. _Fama malum, quo non [aliud] velocius ullum_[108].

WIN. Next them a company of ragged knaves,
Sun-bathing beggars, lazy hedge-creepers,
Sleeping face upwards in the fields all night,
Dream'd strange devices of the sun and moon;
And they, like gipsies, wandering up and down,
Told fortunes, juggled, nicknam'd all the stars,
And were of idiots term'd philosophers.
Such was Pythagoras the silencer;
Prometheus, Thales, Milesius,
Who would all things of water should be made:
Anaximander, Anaxamines,
That positively said the air was God:
Zenocrates, that said there were eight gods;
And Cratoniates and Alcmaeon too,
Who thought the sun and moon and stars were gods.
The poorer sort of them, that could get nought,
Profess'd, like beggarly Franciscan friars,
And the strict order of the Capuchins,
A voluntary, wretched poverty,
Contempt of gold, thin fare, and lying hard.
Yet he that was most vehement in these,
Diogenes, the cynic and the dog,
Was taken coining money in his cell.

WILL SUM. What an old ass was that. Methinks he should have coined
carrot-roots rather; for, as for money, he had no use for['t], except
it were to melt, and solder up holes in his tub withal.

WIN. It were a whole Olympiad's work to tell
How many devilish, _ergo_, armed arts,
Sprung all as vices of this idleness:
For even as soldiers not employ'd in wars,
But living loosely in a quiet state--
Not having wherewithal to maintain pride,
Nay, scarce to find their bellies any food--
Nought but walk melancholy, and devise