we should well perceive that a great part of our horror groweth of our own fancy.  Let us call to mind and consider the state and condition of many other folk in whose state and condition we would wish ourselves to stand, taking them for no prisoners at all, who stand yet for all that in many of the selfsame points that we abhor imprisonment for.  Let us therefore consider these things in order.  First, those other kinds of grief that come with imprisonment are but accidents unto it.  And yet they are neither such accidents as be proper unto it, since they may almost all befall man without it; nor are they such accidents as be inseparable from it, since imprisonment may fall to a man and none of them therein.  We will, I say, therefore begin by considering what manner of pain or incommodity we should reckon imprisonment to be of itself and of its own nature alone.  And then in the course of our communication, you shall as you please increase and aggravate the cause of your horror with the terror of those painful accidents.

VINCENT:  I am sorry that I did interrupt your tale, for you were about, I see well, to take an orderly way therein.  And as you yourself have devised, so I beseech you proceed.  For though I reckon imprisonment much the sorer thing by sore and hard handling therein, yet reckon I not the imprisonment of itself any less than a thing very tedious, although it were used in the most favourable manner that it possibly could be.

For, uncle, if a great prince were taken prisoner upon the field, and in the hand of a Christian king, such as are accustomed, in such cases, for the consideration of their former estate and mutable chance of war, to show much humanity to them, and treat them in very favourable wise—­for these infidel emperors handle oftentimes the princes that they take more villainously than they do the poorest men, as the great Tamberlane kept the great Turk, when he had taken him, to tread on his back always when he leapt on horseback.  But, as I began to say, by the example of a prince taken prisoner, were the imprisonment never so favourable, yet it would be, to my mind, no little grief in itself for a man to be penned up, though not in a narrow chamber.  But although his walk were right large and right fair gardens in it too, it could not but grieve his heart to be restrained by another man within certain limits and bounds, and lose the liberty to be where he please.

ANTHONY:  This is, cousin, well considered of you.  For in this you perceive well that imprisonment is, of itself and of its own very nature alone, nothing else but the retaining of a man’s person within the circuit of a certain space, narrower or larger as shall be limited to him, restraining his liberty from going further into any other place.

VINCENT:  Very well said, methinketh.

ANTHONY:  Yet I forgot, cousin, to ask you one question.

VINCENT:  What is that, uncle?

ANTHONY:  This, lo:  If there be two men kept in two several chambers of one great castle, of which two chambers the one is much larger than the other, are they prisoners both, or only the one who has the less room to walk in?