Impostorum fucus.—­Imposture is a specious thing, yet never worse than when it feigns to be best, and to none discovered sooner than the simplest.  For truth and goodness are plain and open; but imposture is ever ashamed of the light.

Icunculorum motio.—­A puppet-play must be shadowed and seen in the dark; for draw the curtain, et sordet gesticulatio. {24b}

Principes et administri.—­There is a great difference in the understanding of some princes, as in the quality of their ministers about them.  Some would dress their masters in gold, pearl, and all true jewels of majesty; others furnish them with feathers, bells, and ribands, and are therefore esteemed the fitter servants.  But they are ever good men that must make good the times; if the men be naught, the times will be such.  Finis exspectandus est in unoquoque hominum; animali ad mutationem promptissmo. {25a}

Scitum Hispanicum.—­It is a quick saying with the Spaniards, Artes inter haeredes non dividi. {25b} Yet these have inherited their fathers’ lying, and they brag of it.  He is a narrow-minded man that affects a triumph in any glorious study; but to triumph in a lie, and a lie themselves have forged, is frontless.  Folly often goes beyond her bounds; but Impudence knows none.

Non nova res livor.—­Envy is no new thing, nor was it born only in our times.  The ages past have brought it forth, and the coming ages will.  So long as there are men fit for it, quorum odium virtute relicta placet, it will never be wanting.  It is a barbarous envy, to take from those men’s virtues which, because thou canst not arrive at, thou impotently despairest to imitate.  Is it a crime in me that I know that which others had not yet known but from me? or that I am the author of many things which never would have come in thy thought but that I taught them?  It is new but a foolish way you have found out, that whom you cannot equal or come near in doing, you would destroy or ruin with evil speaking; as if you had bound both your wits and natures ’prentices to slander, and then came forth the best artificers when you could form the foulest calumnies.

Nil gratius protervo lib.—­Indeed nothing is of more credit or request now than a petulant paper, or scoffing verses; and it is but convenient to the times and manners we live with, to have then the worst writings and studies flourish when the best begin to be despised.  Ill arts begin where good end.

Jam literae sordent.—­Pastus hodiern. ingen.—­The time was when men would learn and study good things, not envy those that had them.  Then men were had in price for learning; now letters only make men vile.  He is upbraidingly called a poet, as if it were a contemptible nick-name:  but the professors, indeed, have made the learning cheap—­railing and tinkling rhymers, whose writings the vulgar more greedily read, as being taken with the scurrility and petulancy of such wits.  He shall not have a reader now