De corruptela morum.—­There cannot be one colour of the mind, another of the wit.  If the mind be staid, grave, and composed, the wit is so; that vitiated, the other is blown and deflowered.  Do we not see, if the mind languish, the members are dull?  Look upon an effeminate person, his very gait confesseth him.  If a man be fiery, his motion is so; if angry, it is troubled and violent.  So that we may conclude wheresoever manners and fashions are corrupted, language is.  It imitates the public riot.  The excess of feasts and apparel are the notes of a sick state, and the wantonness of language of a sick mind.

De rebus mundanis.—­If we would consider what our affairs are indeed, not what they are called, we should find more evils belonging to us than happen to us.  How often doth that which was called a calamity prove the beginning and cause of a man’s happiness? and, on the contrary, that which happened or came to another with great gratulation and applause, how it hath lifted him but a step higher to his ruin? as if he stood before where he might fall safely.

Vulgi mores.—­Morbus comitialis.—­The vulgar are commonly ill-natured, and always grudging against their governors:  which makes that a prince has more business and trouble with them than ever Hercules had with the bull or any other beast; by how much they have more heads than will be reined with one bridle.  There was not that variety of beasts in the ark, as is of beastly natures in the multitude; especially when they come to that iniquity to censure their sovereign’s actions.  Then all the counsels are made good or bad by the events; and it falleth out that the same facts receive from them the names, now of diligence, now of vanity, now of majesty, now of fury; where they ought wholly to hang on his mouth, as he to consist of himself, and not others’ counsels.

Princeps.—­After God, nothing is to be loved of man like the prince; he violates Nature that doth it not with his whole heart.  For when he hath put on the care of the public good and common safety, I am a wretch, and put off man, if I do not reverence and honour him, in whose charge all things divine and human are placed.  Do but ask of Nature why all living creatures are less delighted with meat and drink that sustains them than with venery that wastes them? and she will tell thee, the first respects but a private, the other a common good, propagation.

De eodem.—­Orpheus’ Hymn.—­He is the arbiter of life and death:  when he finds no other subject for his mercy, he should spare himself.  All his punishments are rather to correct than to destroy.  Why are prayers with Orpheus said to be the daughters of Jupiter, but that princes are thereby admonished that the petitions of the wretched ought to have more weight with them than the laws themselves.

De opt.  Rege Jacobo.—­It was a great accumulation to His Majesty’s deserved praise that men might openly visit and pity those whom his greatest prisons had at any time received or his laws condemned.