rate copulations, with unmusicianlike balls, and theatres
become monstrous through shameful songs and rehearsals; and barbarous
and brutish shows are again accompanied with an unrelenting temper and
savage cruelty towards mankind. Hence it was that the divine Lycurgus in
his Three Books of Laws gave orders that the doors and ridges of
men's houses should be made with a saw and an axe, and that no other
instrument should so much as be brought to any house. Not that he
did hereby intend to declare war against augers and planes and other
instruments of finer work; but because he very well knew that with such
tools as these you will never bring into your house a gilded couch,
and that you will never attempt to bring into a slender cottage either
silver tables, purple carpets, or costly stones; but that a plain supper
and a homely dinner must accompany such a house, couch table, and cup.
The beginning of a vicious diet is presently followed by all sorts of
luxury and expensiveness,

Ev'n as a mare is by her thirsty colt.
============= And what meal is not expensive? One for which no animal is
put to death. Shall we reckon a soul to be a small expense? I will not
say perhaps of a mother, or a father, or of some friend, or child, as
Empedocles did; but one participating of feeling, of seeing, of hearing,
of imagination, and of intellection; which each animal hath received
from Nature for the acquiring of what is agreeable to it, and the
avoiding what is disagreeable. Do but consider this with yourself now,
which sort of philosophers render us most tame and civil, they who bid
people to feed on their children, friends, fathers, and wives, when they
are dead; or Pythagoras and Empedocles, that accustom men to be just
towards even the other members of the creation. You laugh at a man that
will not eat a sheep: but we (they will say again)--when we see you
cutting off the parts of your dead father or mother, and sending it to
your absent friends, and calling upon and inviting your present
friends to eat the rest freely and heartily--shall we not smile? Nay,
peradventure we offend at this instant time while we touch these books,
without having first cleansed our hands, eyes, feet, and ears; if it be
not (by Jupiter) a sufficient purgation of them to have discoursed of
these matters in potable and fresh language (as Plato speaketh), thereby
washing off the brackishness of hearing. Now if a man should set these
books and discour