s, piracies and sea-fights; peace, leagues,
stratagems, and fresh alarms. A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions,
edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints,
grievances are daily brought to our ears. New books every day, pamphlets,
corantoes, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new
paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy,
religion, &c. Now come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries,
entertainments, jubilees, embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies,
triumphs, revels, sports, plays: then again, as in a new shifted scene,
treasons, cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villainies in all kinds,
funerals, burials, deaths of princes, new discoveries, expeditions, now
comical, then tragical matters. Today we hear of new lords and officers
created, tomorrow of some great men deposed, and then again of fresh
honours conferred; one is let loose, another imprisoned; one purchaseth,
another breaketh: he thrives, his neighbour turns bankrupt; now plenty,
then again dearth and famine; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs,
weeps, &c. This I daily hear, and such like, both private and public news,
amidst the gallantry and misery of the world; jollity, pride, perplexities
and cares, simplicity and villainy; subtlety, knavery, candour and
integrity, mutually mixed and offering themselves; I rub on _privus
privatus_; as I have still lived, so I now continue, _statu quo prius_,
left to a solitary life, and mine own domestic discontents: saving that
sometimes, _ne quid mentiar_, as Diogenes went into the city, and
Democritus to the haven to see fashions, I did for my recreation now and
then walk abroad, look into the world, and could not choose but make some
little observation, _non tam sagax observator ac simplex recitator_, [45]
not as they did, to scoff or laugh at all, but with a mixed passion.

[46] "Bilem saepe, jocum vestri movere tumultus."

"Ye wretched mimics, whose fond heats have been,
How oft! the objects of my mirth and spleen."

I did sometime laugh and scoff with Lucian, and satirically tax with
Menippus, lament with Heraclitus, sometimes again I was [47]_petulanti
splene chachinno_, and then again, [48]_urere bilis jecur_, I was much
moved to see that abuse which I could not mend. In which passion howsoever
I may sympathise with him or them, 'tis for no such respect I shroud myself
under his name; but either in an unknown habi