ate, so will the commons most part be, idle, unthrifts, prone to
lust, drunkards, and therefore poor and needy ([Greek: hae penia stasin
empoiei kai kakourgian], for poverty begets sedition and villainy) upon all
occasions ready to mutiny and rebel, discontent still, complaining,
murmuring, grudging, apt to all outrages, thefts, treasons, murders,
innovations, in debt, shifters, cozeners, outlaws, _Profligatae famae ac
vitae_. It was an old [499]politician's aphorism, "They that are poor and
bad envy rich, hate good men, abhor the present government, wish for a new,
and would have all turned topsy-turvy." When Catiline rebelled in Rome, he
got a company of such debauched rogues together, they were his familiars
and coadjutors, and such have been your rebels most part in all ages, Jack
Cade, Tom Straw, Kette, and his companions.

Where they be generally riotous and contentious, where there be many
discords, many laws, many lawsuits, many lawyers and many physicians, it is
a manifest sign of a distempered, melancholy state, as [500]Plato long
since maintained: for where such kind of men swarm, they will make more
work for themselves, and that body politic diseased, which was otherwise
sound. A general mischief in these our times, an insensible plague, and
never so many of them: "which are now multiplied" (saith Mat. Geraldus,
[501]a lawyer himself,) "as so many locusts, not the parents, but the
plagues of the country, and for the most part a supercilious, bad,
covetous, litigious generation of men." [502]_Crumenimulga natio_ &c. A
purse-milking nation, a clamorous company, gowned vultures, [503]_qui ex
injuria vivent et sanguine civium_, thieves and seminaries of discord;
worse than any pollers by the highway side, _auri accipitres, auri
exterebronides, pecuniarum hamiolae, quadruplatores, curiae harpagones,
fori tintinabula, monstra hominum, mangones_, &c. that take upon them to
make peace, but are indeed the very disturbers of our peace, a company of
irreligious harpies, scraping, griping catchpoles, (I mean our common
hungry pettifoggers, [504]_rabulas forenses_, love and honour in the
meantime all good laws, and worthy lawyers, that are so many [505]oracles
and pilots of a well-governed commonwealth). Without art, without judgment,
that do more harm, as [506]Livy said, _quam bella externa, fames, morbive_,
than sickness, wars, hunger, diseases; "and cause a most incredible
destruction of a commonwealth," saith [507]Sese