VI

Lands and possessions many men esteem much more yet than money, because the lands seem not so casual as money is, or plate.  For though their other substance may be stolen and taken away, yet evermore they think that their land will lie still where it lay.  But what are we the better that our land cannot be stirred, but will lie still where it lay, since we ourselves may be removed and not suffered to come near it?  What great difference is there to us, whether our substance be movable or unmovable, since we be so movable ourselves that we may be removed from them both and lose them both twain?  Yet sometimes in the money is the surety somewhat more.  For when we be fain ourselves to flee, we may make shift to carry some of our money with us, whereas of our land we cannot carry one inch.

If our land be a thing of more surety than our money, how happeth it then that in this persecution we are more afraid to lose it?  For if it be a thing of more surety, then can it not so soon be lost.  In the transfer of these two great empires—­Greece first, since I myself was born, and after Syria, since you were born too—­the land was lost before the money was found!

Oh, Cousin Vincent, if the whole world were animated with a reasonable soul, as Plato thought it were, and if it had wit and understanding to mark and perceive everything, Lord God, how the ground on which a prince buildeth his palace would loud laugh its lord to scorn, when it saw him proud of his possession and heard him boast himself that he and his blood are for ever the very lords and owners of the land!  For then would the ground think the while, to itself, “Ah, thou poor soul, who thinkest thou wert half a god, and art amid thy glory but a man in a gay gown!  I who am the ground here, over whom thou are so proud, have had a hundred such owners of me as thou callest thyself, more than ever thou hast heard the names of.  And some of them who went proudly over mine head now lie low in my belly, and my side lieth over them.  And many a one shall, as thou does now, call himself mine owner after thee, who shall neither be kin to thy blood nor have heard any word of thy name.”

Who owned your village, cousin, three thousand years ago?

VINCENT:  Three thousand, uncle?  Nay, nay, in any king, Christian or heathen, you may strike off a third part of that well enough—­and, as far as I know, half of the rest, too.  In far fewer years than three thousand it may well fortune that a poor ploughman’s blood may come up to a kingdom, and a king’s right royal kin on the other hand fall down to the plough and cart, and neither that king know that ever he came from the cart, nor that carter know that ever he came from the crown.

ANTHONY:  We find, Cousin Vincent, in full ancient stories many strange changes as marvellous as that, come about in the compass of very few years, in effect.  And are such things then in reason so greatly to be set by, that we should esteem the loss so great, when we see that in keeping them our surety is so little?