lead us, except we voluntarily leap over those boundaries which she
has cautiously set to our finite beings. Nature glitters most in her
own plain, homely garb, and then gives the greatest lustre when she is
unsullied from all artificial garnish.

[Illustration: 151]

Thus if we enquire into the state of all dumb creatures, we shall find
those fare best that are left to nature's conduct: as to instance in
bees, what is more to be admired than the industry and contrivance of
these little animals?

What architect could ever form so curious a structure as they give a
model of in their inimitable combs? What kingdom can be governed with
better discipline than they exactly observe in their respective hives?
While the horse, by turning a rebel to nature, and becoming a slave
to man, undergoes the worst of tyranny: he is sometimes spurred on to
battle so long till he draw his guts after him for trapping, and at last
falls down, and bites the ground instead of grass; not to mention the
penalty of his jaws being curbed, his tail docked, his back wrung, his
sides spur-galled, his close imprisonment in a stable, his rapshin and
fetters when he runs a grass, and a great many other plagues, which
he might have avoided, if he had kept to that first station of freedom
which nature placed him in. How much more desirable is the unconfined
range of flies and birds, who living by instinct, would want nothing
to complete their happiness, if some well-employed Domitian would not
persecute the former, nor the sly fowler lay snares and gins for the
entrapping of the other? And if young birds, before their unfledged
wings can carry them from their nests, are caught, and pent up in a
cage, for the being taught to sing, or whistle, all their new tunes make
not half so sweet music as their wild notes, and natural melody: so much
does that which is but rough-drawn by nature surpass and excel all the
additional paint and varnish of art And we cannot sure but commend
and admire that Pythagorean cock, which (as Lucian relates) had been
successively a man, a woman, a prince, a subject, a fish, a horse, and
a frog; after all his experience, he summed up his judgment in this
censure, that man was the most wretched and deplorable of all creatures,
all other patiently grazing within the enclosures of nature, while man
only broke out, and strayed beyond those safer limits, which he was
justly confined to. And Gryllus is to be adjudged wiser than the
muc