me plants flourish, are green
and gay, and exhibit their beauty, all the year round, while others are
sometimes gay like them, at other times, like some unthrift, run through
their resources entirely, and are left bare and naked. Consider again
their various shapes, how some produce oblong fruits, others angular,
others smooth and round. But perhaps you will not care to pry into all
this, since you will find nothing bad. If you must then ever bestow your
time and attention on what is bad, as the serpent lives but in deadly
matter, go to history, and turn your eye on the sum total of human
misery. For there you will find "the falls of men, and murders of their
lives,"[617] rapes of women, attacks of slaves, treachery of friends,
mixing of poisons, envyings, jealousies, "shipwrecks of families," and
dethroning of princes. Sate and cloy yourself on these, you will by so
doing vex and enrage none of your associates.

Sec. VI. But it seems curiosity does not rejoice in stale evils, but only
in fresh and recent ones, gladly viewing the spectacle of tragedies of
yesterday, but backward in taking part in comic and festive scenes. And
so the curious person is a languid and listless hearer to the narrator
of a marriage, or sacrifice, or solemn procession, he says he has heard
most of all that before, bids the narrator cut it short and come to the
point; but if his visitor tell him of the violation of some girl, or the
adultery of some married woman, or the disputes and intended litigation
of brothers, he doesn't go to sleep then, nor pretend want of leisure,

"But he pricks up his ears, and asks for more."

And indeed those lines,

"Alas! how quicker far to mortals' ears
Do ill news travel than the news of good!"

are truly said of curious people. For as cupping-glasses take away the
worst blood, so the ears of curious people attract only the worst
reports; or rather, as cities have certain ominous and gloomy gates,
through which they conduct only condemned criminals, or convey filth and
night soil, for nothing pure or holy has either ingress into or egress
from them, so into the ears of curious people goes nothing good or
elegant, but tales of murders travel and lodge there, wafting a whiff of
unholy and obscene narrations.

"And ever in my house is heard alone
The sound of wailing;"

this is to the curious their one Muse and Siren, this the sweetest note
they can hear. For curiosity desires to know what is h