I have done with families, and will now briefly run over some few sorts and conditions of men.  The most secure, happy, jovial, and merry in the world’s esteem are princes and great men, free from melancholy:  but for their cares, miseries, suspicions, jealousies, discontents, folly and madness, I refer you to Xenophon’s Tyrannus, where king Hieron discourseth at large with Simonides the poet, of this subject.  Of all others they are most troubled with perpetual fears, anxieties, insomuch, that as he said in [707]Valerius, if thou knewest with what cares and miseries this robe were stuffed, thou wouldst not stoop to take it up.  Or put case they be secure and free from fears and discontents, yet they are void [708]of reason too oft, and precipitate in their actions, read all our histories, quos de stultis prodidere stulti, Iliades, Aeneides, Annales, and what is the subject?

       “Stultorum regum, et populorum continet aestus.”

       “The giddy tumults and the foolish rage
        Of kings and people.”

How mad they are, how furious, and upon small occasions, rash and inconsiderate in their proceedings, how they dote, every page almost will witness,

------“delirant reges, plectuntur Achivi.”

       “When doting monarchs urge
        Unsound resolves, their subjects feel the scourge.”

Next in place, next in miseries and discontents, in all manner of hair-brain actions, are great men, procul a Jove, procul a fulmine, the nearer the worse.  If they live in court, they are up and down, ebb and flow with their princes’ favours, Ingenium vultu statque caditque suo, now aloft, tomorrow down, as [709]Polybius describes them, “like so many casting counters, now of gold, tomorrow of silver, that vary in worth as the computant will; now they stand for units, tomorrow for thousands; now before all, and anon behind.”  Beside, they torment one another with mutual factions, emulations:  one is ambitious, another enamoured, a third in debt, a prodigal, overruns his fortunes, a fourth solicitous with cares, gets nothing, &c.  But for these men’s discontents, anxieties, I refer you to Lucian’s Tract, de mercede conductis, [710]Aeneas Sylvius (libidinis et stultitiae servos, he calls them), Agrippa, and many others.

Of philosophers and scholars priscae sapientiae dictatores, I have already spoken in general terms, those superintendents of wit and learning, men above men, those refined men, minions of the muses,

[711]   ------“mentemque habere queis bonam
Et esse [712]corculis datum est.”------

[713]These acute and subtle sophisters, so much honoured, have as much need of hellebore as others.—­[714]_O medici mediam pertundite venam._ Read Lucian’s Piscator, and tell how he esteemed them; Agrippa’s Tract of the vanity of Sciences; nay read their own works, their absurd tenets, prodigious paradoxes, et risum teneatis amici?  You shall find