om it has its value, should
yet be thought of less value than this metal. That a man of lead, who
has no more sense than a log of wood, and is as bad as he is foolish,
should have many wise and good men to serve him, only because he has a
great heap of that metal; and that if it should happen that by some
accident or trick of law (which sometimes produces as great changes as
chance itself) all this wealth should pass from the master to the
meanest varlet of his whole family, he himself would very soon become
one of his servants, as if he were a thing that belonged to his wealth,
and so were bound to follow its fortune. But they much more admire and
detest the folly of those who when they see a rich man, though they
neither owe him anything, nor are in any sort dependent on his bounty,
yet merely because he is rich give him little less than divine honours;
even though they know him to be so covetous and base-minded, that
notwithstanding all his wealth, he will not part with one farthing of it
to them as long as he lives.

These and such like notions has that people imbibed, partly from their
education, being bred in a country whose customs and laws are opposite
to all such foolish maxims, and partly from their learning and studies;
for though there are but few in any town that are so wholly excused from
labour as to give themselves entirely up to their studies, these being
only such persons as discover from their childhood an extraordinary
capacity and disposition for letters; yet their children, and a great
part of the nation, both men and women, are taught to spend those hours
in which they are not obliged to work in reading: and this they do
through the whole progress of life. They have all their learning in
their own tongue, which is both a copious and pleasant language, and in
which a man can fully express his mind. It runs over a great tract of
many countries, but it is not equally pure in all places. They had never
so much as heard of the names of any of those philosophers that are so
famous in these parts of the world, before we went among them; and yet
they had made the same discoveries as the Greeks, both in music, logic,
arithmetic, and geometry. But as they are almost in everything equal to
the ancient philosophers, so they far exceed our modern logicians; for
they have never yet fallen upon the barbarous niceties that our youth
are forced to learn in those trifling logical schools that are among us;
they are