f sullen imaginations and displeasing
annoyance! For if you live joyful, merry, jocund, and glad, I cannot be
but rich enough. Everybody cries up thrift, thrift, and good husbandry.
But many speak of Robin Hood that never shot in his bow, and talk of that
virtue of mesnagery who know not what belongs to it. It is by me that they
must be advised. From me, therefore, take this advertisement and
information, that what is imputed to me for a vice hath been done in
imitation of the university and parliament of Paris, places in which is to
be found the true spring and source of the lively idea of Pantheology and
all manner of justice. Let him be counted a heretic that doubteth thereof,
and doth not firmly believe it. Yet they in one day eat up their bishop,
or the revenue of the bishopric--is it not all one?--for a whole year, yea,
sometimes for two. This is done on the day he makes his entry, and is
installed. Nor is there any place for an excuse; for he cannot avoid it,
unless he would be hooted at and stoned for his parsimony.

It hath been also esteemed an act flowing from the habit of the four
cardinal virtues. Of prudence in borrowing money beforehand; for none
knows what may fall out. Who is able to tell if the world shall last yet
three years? But although it should continue longer, is there any man so
foolish as to have the confidence to promise himself three years?

What fool so confident to say,
That he shall live one other day?

Of commutative justice, in buying dear, I say, upon trust, and selling
goods cheap, that is, for ready money. What says Cato in his Book of
Husbandry to this purpose? The father of a family, says he, must be a
perpetual seller; by which means it is impossible but that at last he shall
become rich, if he have of vendible ware enough still ready for sale.

Of distributive justice it doth partake, in giving entertainment to good
--remark, good--and gentle fellows, whom fortune had shipwrecked, like
Ulysses, upon the rock of a hungry stomach without provision of sustenance;
and likewise to the good--remark, the good--and young wenches. For,
according to the sentence of Hippocrates, Youth is impatient of hunger,
chiefly if it be vigorous, lively, frolic, brisk, stirring, and bouncing.
Which wanton lasses willingly and heartily devote themselves to the
pleasure of honest men; and are in so far both Platonic and Ciceronian,
that they do acknowledge their being born into this w