Page:Plutarch - Moralia, translator Holland, 1911.djvu/166

144 cost and expense, to some one kept under lock and key, and besides sumptuous: notwithstanding it fall out many times that such an one is as ill-favoured as she is foul? Semblably, and even the same do our curious folk: they omit and cast behind them many fair and goodly sights to behold, many excellent lectures worth the hearing, many disputations, discourses, honest exercises and pastimes; but in other men's letters they keep a puddering, they open and read them, they stand like eaves-droppers under their neighbours' walls, hearkening what is done or said within, they are ready to intrude themselves to listen what whispering there is between servants of the house; what secret talk there is among silly women when they be in some odd corner, and, as many times they are by this means not free from danger, so always they meet with shame and infamy.

And therefore very expedient it were for such curious folk, if they would shift off and put by this vice of theirs, eftsoons to call to mind (as much as they can) what they have either known or heard by such inquisition: for if (as Simonides was wont to say) that when he came (after some time between) to open his desks and coffers, he found one which was appointed for gifts and rewards always full, the other ordained for thanks and the graces void and empty: so, a man after a good time past, set open the store-house of curiosity, and look into it what is therein, and see it top full of many unprofitable, vain and unpleasant things; peradventure the very outward sight and face thereof will discontent and offend him, appearing in every respect so loveless and toyish as it is. Go to then: if one should set in hand to turn over leaf by leaf the books of ancient writers, and when he hath picked forth and gathered out the worst, make one volume of all together, to wit, of those headless and unperfect verses of Homer, which haply begin with a short syllable, and therefore be called : or of the solecisms and incongruities which be found in tragedies: or of the un-decent and intemperate speeches which Archilochus framed against women, whereby he defamed and shamed himself: were he not (I pray you) worthy of this tragical curse:

A foul ill take thee, thou lewd wretch. That lovest to collect The faults of mortal men now dead. The living to infect.

But to let these maledictions alone, certes, this treasuring and scoring up by him of other men's errors and misdeeds, is both unseemly, and also unprofitable: much like unto that city which