ty there is in
the relieving of you, and you remain faster bound than ever. Nor do I know
for the removal of this inconveniency any remedy but one.

Take heed, I have often heard it said in a vulgar proverb, The wise may be
instructed by a fool. Seeing the answers and responses of sage and
judicious men have in no manner of way satisfied you, take advice of some
fool, and possibly by so doing you may come to get that counsel which will
be agreeable to your own heart's desire and contentment. You know how by
the advice and counsel and prediction of fools, many kings, princes,
states, and commonwealths have been preserved, several battles gained, and
divers doubts of a most perplexed intricacy resolved. I am not so
diffident of your memory as to hold it needful to refresh it with a
quotation of examples, nor do I so far undervalue your judgment but that I
think it will acquiesce in the reason of this my subsequent discourse. As
he who narrowly takes heed to what concerns the dexterous management of his
private affairs, domestic businesses, and those adoes which are confined
within the strait-laced compass of one family, who is attentive, vigilant,
and active in the economic rule of his own house, whose frugal spirit never
strays from home, who loseth no occasion whereby he may purchase to himself
more riches, and build up new heaps of treasure on his former wealth, and
who knows warily how to prevent the inconveniences of poverty, is called a
worldly wise man, though perhaps in the second judgment of the
intelligences which are above he be esteemed a fool,--so, on the contrary,
is he most like, even in the thoughts of all celestial spirits, to be not
only sage, but to presage events to come by divine inspiration, who laying
quite aside those cares which are conducible to his body or his fortunes,
and, as it were, departing from himself, rids all his senses of terrene
affections, and clears his fancies of those plodding studies which harbour
in the minds of thriving men. All which neglects of sublunary things are
vulgarily imputed folly. After this manner, the son of Picus, King of the
Latins, the great soothsayer Faunus, was called Fatuus by the witless
rabble of the common people. The like we daily see practised amongst the
comic players, whose dramatic roles, in distribution of the personages,
appoint the acting of the fool to him who is the wisest of the troop. In
approbation also of this fashion the mathematici