Cum videam miserum hunc tam excruciarier
Miseret me ejus. Quod potero adjutabo senem.

"Consider the temper of the man, to move your pity; a person _extremely
passionate and peevish, and wholly impatient of contradiction_. A
temper which, whether it be a greater fault or torment (to one who must
so often meet with what he is so ill able to bear), is hard to say.

"And to this fretful humour you must add another as bad, which feeds
it. You are therefore next to consider him as _one highly opinionative
and magisterial_. _Fanciful_ in his conceptions, and deeply enamoured
with those _phantasmes_, without a rival. He doth not spare to
profess, upon all occasions, how incomparably he thinks himself to
have _surpassed all_, ancient, modern, schools, academies, persons,
societies, philosophers, divines, heathens, Christians; how despicable
he thinks all their writings in comparison of his; and what hopes he
hath, that, by _the sovereign command of some absolute prince, all
other doctrines being exploded, his new dictates should be_
_peremptorily imposed, to be alone taught in all schools and pulpits,
and universally submitted to_. To recount all which he speaks of
himself _magnificently_, and _contemptuously_ of others, would fill a
volume. Should some idle person read over all his books, and
collecting together his arrogant and supercilious speeches, applauding
himself, and despising all other men, set them forth in one
_synopsis_, with this title, _Hobbius de se_--what a pretty piece of
pageantry this would make!

"The admirable sweetness of your own nature has not given you the
experience of such a temper: yet your contemplation must have needs
discerned it, in those symptoms which you have seen it work in others,
like the strange effervescence, ebullition, fumes, and fetors, which
you have sometimes given yourself the content to observe, in some
active _acrimonious_ chymical _spirits_ upon the injection of some
contrariant _salts_ strangely vexing, fretting, and tormenting itself,
while it doth but administer _sport_ to the unconcerned spectator.
Which temper, being so eminent in the person we have to deal with,
your generous nature, which cannot but pity affliction, how much
soever deserved, must needs have some compassion for him: who, besides
those exquisite _torments_ wherewith he doth afflict himself, like
that

----quo Siculi non invenere Tyranni
Tormentum majus--

is unavoidably exposed to those t