Page:An English Garner Ingatherings from Our History and Literature (Volume 1 1877).pdf/509

 Others are so hardly bestead for a loading, that they are fain to retail the cinders of Troy, and the shivers of broken trunchions, to fill up their boat; that else should go empty: and if they have but a pound's weight of good merchandise, it shall be placed at the poop, or plucked into a thousand pieces to credit their carriage.

For my part every man as he likes. Mens cujusque is est quisque. 'Tis as good to go in cut-fingered pumps as cork shoes: if one wear Cornish diamonds on his toes. To explain it by a more familiar example. An ass is no great statesman in the beasts' commonwealth, though he wear his ears, upsevant muffe, after the Muscovy fashion, and hang the lip like a cap-case half open; or look as demurely as a sixpenny brown loaf; for he hath some imperfections that do keep him from the common Council: yet, of many, he is deemed a very virtuous member, and one of the honestest sort of men that are. So that our opinion—as SEXTIUS EMPEDOCUS affirmeth—gives the name of good or ill to every thing. Out of whose works—lately translated into English, for the benefit of unlearned writers—a man might collect a whole book of this argument: which, no doubt, would prove a worthy commonwealth matter; and far better than wit's wax kernel. Much good worship have the author!

Such is this golden age wherein we live, and so replenished with golden asses of all sorts: that if learning had lost itself in a grove of genealogies; we need do no more but set an old goose over half a dozen pottle pots (which are, as it were, the eggs of invention) and we shall have such a breed of books, within a while after, as will fill all the world with the wild fowl of good wits.

I can tell you this is a harder thing than making gold of quicksilver; and will trouble you more than the moral of