e, did I drink in melancholy into myself? It is
my thoughtfulness; was I not made to think? It is my study; doth not my
calling call for that? I have done nothing wilfully, perversely toward
it, yet must suffer in it, die by it. There are too many examples of men
that have been their own executioners, and that have made hard shift to
be so: some have always had poison about them, in a hollow ring upon
their finger, and some in their pen that they used to write with; some
have beat out their brains at the wall of their prison, and some have
eat the fire out of their chimneys;[169] and one is said to have come
nearer our case than so, to have strangled himself, though his hands
were bound, by crushing his throat between his knees. But I do nothing
upon myself, and yet am mine own executioner. And we have heard of death
upon small occasions and by scornful instruments: a pin, a comb, a hair
pulled, hath gangrened and killed; but when I have said a vapour, if I
were asked again what is a vapour, I could not tell, it is so insensible
a thing; so near nothing is that that reduces us to nothing. But extend
this vapour, rarefy it; from so narrow a room as our natural bodies, to
any politic body, to a state. That which is fume in us is, in a state
rumour; and these vapours in us, which we consider here pestilent and
infectious fumes, are, in a state, infecitious rumours, detracting and
dishonourable calumnies, libels, The heart in that body is the king, and
the bran his council; and the whole magistracy, that ties all together,
is the sinews which proceed from thence; and the life of all is honour,
and just respect, and due reverence; and therefore, when these vapours,
these venomous rumours, are directed against these noble parts, the
whole body suffers. But yet for all their privileges, they are not
privileged from our misery; that as the vapours most pernicious to us
arise in our own bodies, so do the most dishonourable rumours, and those
that wound a state most arise at home. What ill air that I could have
met in the street, what channel, what shambles, what dunghill, what
vault, could have hurt me so much as these homebred vapours? What
fugitive, what almsman of any foreign state, can do so much harm as a
detractor, a libeller, a scornful jester at home? For as they that write
of poisons, and of creatures naturally disposed to the ruin of man, do
as well mention the flea as the viper[170], because the flea, though he
kill non