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, which 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. Lord 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 of a reverse; such summer birds are men. But now
with music and state the banquet of smoking dishes was served up; and
when the guests had a little done admiring whence the bankrupt Timon
could find means to furnish so costly a feast, some doubting whether the
scene which they saw was real, as sca