espect of being accounted
wise, ingenuously confess how many insurrections of rebellious thoughts,
and pangs of a labouring mind, ye are perpetually thrown and tortured
with; reckon up all those inconveniences that you are unavoidably
subject to, and then tell me whether fools, by being exempted from
all these embroilments, are not infinitely more free and happy than
yourselves? Add to this, that fools do not barely laugh, and sing, and
play the good-fellow alone to themselves: but as it is the nature of
good to be communicative, so they impart their mirth to others, by
making sport for the whole company they are at any time engaged in, as
if providence purposely designed them for an antidote to melancholy:
whereby they make all persons so fond of their society, that they are
welcomed to all places, hugged, caressed, and defended, a liberty given
them of saying or doing anything; so well beloved, that none dares to
offer them the least injury; nay, the most ravenous beasts of prey will
pass them by untouched, as if by instinct they were warned that such
innocence ought to receive no hurt. Farther, their converse is so
acceptable in the court of princes, that few kings will banquet, walk,
or take any other diversion, without their attendance; nay, and had much
rather have their company, than that of their gravest counsellors, whom
they maintain more for fashion-sake than good-will; nor is it so strange
that these fools should be preferred before graver politicians, since
these last, by their harsh, sour advice, and ill-timing the truth, are
fit only to put a prince out of the humour, while the others laugh, and
talk, and joke, without any danger of disobliging.

It is one farther very commendable property of fools, that they always
speak the truth, than which there is nothing more noble and heroical.
For so, though Plato relate it as a sentence of Alcibiades, that in the
sea of drunkenness truth swims uppermost, and so wine is the only teller
of truth, yet this character may more justly be assumed by me, as I
can make good from the authority of Euripides, who lays down this as
an axiom _uwpa uwpos heyei_. Children and fools always speak the truth.
Whatever the fool has in his heart he betrays it in his face; or what
is more notifying, discovers it by his words: while the wise man, as
Euripides observes, carries a double tongue; the one to speak what may
be said, the other what ought to be; the one what truth, the other wh