l disposition and humane inclination I borrowed from my parents,
and regulate it to the written and prescribed laws of charity: and if I
hold the true anatomy of myself, I am delineated and naturally framed to
such a piece of virtue; for I am of a constitution so general that it
consorts and sympathizeth with all things: I have no antipathy, or
rather idiosyncrasy, in diet, humor, air, anything. I wonder not at the
French for their dishes of frogs, snails, and toadstools; nor at the
Jews for locusts and grasshoppers; but being amongst them, make them my
common viands, and I find they agree with my stomach as well as theirs.
I could digest a salad gathered in a churchyard as well as in a garden.
I cannot start at the presence of a serpent, scorpion, lizard, or
salamander: at the sight of a toad or viper I find in me no desire to
take up a stone to destroy them. I feel not in myself those common
antipathies that I can discover in others; those national repugnances do
not touch me, nor do I behold with prejudice the French, Italian,
Spaniard, or Dutch: but where I find their actions in balance with my
countrymen's, I honor, love, and embrace them in the same degree. I was
born in the eighth climate, but seem for to be framed and constellated
unto all: I am no plant that will not prosper out of a garden; all
places, all airs, make unto me one country; I am in England, everywhere,
and under any meridian; I have been shipwrecked, yet am not enemy with
the sea or winds; I can study, play or sleep in a tempest. In brief, I
am averse from nothing: my conscience would give me the lie if I should
absolutely detest or hate any essence but the Devil; or so at least
abhor anything but that we might come to composition. If there be any
among those common objects of hatred I do contemn and laugh at, it is
that great enemy of reason, virtue, and religion--the multitude: that
numerous piece of monstrosity which, taken asunder, seem men and the
reasonable creatures of God, but confused together, make but one great
beast and a monstrosity more prodigious than Hydra: it is no breach of
charity to call these fools; it is the style all holy writers have
afforded them, set down by Solomon in canonical Scripture, and a point
of our faith to believe so. Neither in the name of multitude do I only
include the base and minor sort of people: there is a rabble even
amongst the gentry, a sort of plebeian heads, whose fancy moves with the
same wheel as t