is
it a matter judiciously confessed by her, nor authentically proved by
others that she is a witch. Let us for the present suspend our judgment,
and defer till after your return from thence the sifting and garbling of
those niceties. Do we know but that she may be an eleventh sibyl or a
second Cassandra? But although she were neither, and she did not merit the
name or title of any of these renowned prophetesses, what hazard, in the
name of God, do you run by offering to talk and confer with her of the
instant perplexity and perturbation of your thoughts? Seeing especially,
and which is most of all, she is, in the estimation of those that are
acquainted with her, held to know more, and to be of a deeper reach of
understanding, than is either customary to the country wherein she liveth
or to the sex whereof she is. What hindrance, hurt, or harm doth the
laudable desire of knowledge bring to any man, were it from a sot, a pot, a
fool, a stool, a winter mitten, a truckle for a pulley, the lid of a
goldsmith's crucible, an oil-bottle, or old slipper? You may remember to
have read, or heard at least, that Alexander the Great, immediately after
his having obtained a glorious victory over the King Darius in Arbela,
refused, in the presence of the splendid and illustrious courtiers that
were about him, to give audience to a poor certain despicable-like fellow,
who through the solicitations and mediation of some of his royal attendants
was admitted humbly to beg that grace and favour of him. But sore did he
repent, although in vain, a thousand and ten thousand times thereafter, the
surly state which he then took upon him to the denial of so just a suit,
the grant whereof would have been worth unto him the value of a brace of
potent cities. He was indeed victorious in Persia, but withal so far
distant from Macedonia, his hereditary kingdom, that the joy of the one did
not expel the extreme grief which through occasion of the other he had
inwardly conceived; for, not being able with all his power to find or
invent a convenient mean and expedient how to get or come by the certainty
of any news from thence, both by reason of the huge remoteness of the
places from one to another, as also because of the impeditive interposition
of many great rivers, the interjacent obstacle of divers wild deserts, and
obstructive interjection of sundry almost inaccessible mountains,--whilst
he was in this sad quandary and solicitous pensiveness,