“Quae nequeunt secum ferre aut abducere, perdunt;
          Et cremat insontes turba scelesta casas . . . 
          Muris nulla fides, squalent populatibus agri.”

["What they cannot bear away, they spoil; and the wicked mob burn harmless houses; walls cannot secure their masters, and the fields are squalid with devastation.”  —­Ovid, Trist., iii. 10, 35; Claudianus, In Eutyop., i. 244.]

Besides this shock, I suffered others:  I underwent the inconveniences that moderation brings along with it in such a disease:  I was robbed on all hands; to the Ghibelline I was a Guelph, and to the Guelph a Ghibelline; one of my poets expresses this very well, but I know not where it is.

     ["So Tories called me Whig, and Whigs a Tory.”—­Pope, after Horace.]

The situation of my house, and my friendliness with my neighbours, presented me with one face; my life and my actions with another.  They did not lay formal accusations to my charge, for they had no foundation for so doing; I never hide my head from the laws, and whoever would have questioned me, would have done himself a greater prejudice than me; they were only mute suspicions that were whispered about, which never want appearance in so confused a mixture, no more than envious or idle heads.  I commonly myself lend a hand to injurious presumptions that fortune scatters abroad against me, by a way I have ever had of evading to justify, excuse, or explain myself; conceiving that it were to compromise my conscience to plead in its behalf: 

“Perspicuitas enim argumentatione elevatur;”

     ["For perspicuity is lessened by argument.” 
     ("The clearness of a cause is clouded by argumentation.”)
     —­Cicero, De Nat.  Deor., iii. 4.]

and, as if every one saw as clearly into me as I do myself, instead of retiring from an accusation, I step up to meet it, and rather give it some kind of colour by an ironical and scoffing confession, if I do not sit totally mute, as of a thing not worth my answer.  But such as look upon this kind of behaviour of mine as too haughty a confidence, have as little kindness for me as they who interpret the weakness of an indefensible cause; namely, the great folks, towards whom want of submission is the great fault, harsh towards all justice that knows and feels itself, and is not submissive humble, and suppliant; I have often knocked my head against this pillar.  So it is that at what then befell me, an ambitious man would have hanged himself, and a covetous man would have done the same.  I have no manner of care of getting;

         “Si mihi, quod nunc est, etiam minus; et mihi vivam
          Quod superest aevi, si quid superesse volent dii:” 

["If I may have what I now own, or even less, and may live for
myself what of life remains, if the gods grant me remaining years.” 
—­Horace, Ep., i. 18, 107.]

but the losses that befall me by the injury of others, whether by theft or violence, go almost as near my heart as they would to that of the most avaricious man.  The offence troubles me, without comparison, more than the loss.  A thousand several sorts of mischiefs fell upon me in the neck of one another; I could more cheerfully have borne them all at once.