or a lack of money brings many tormentors: debts, dues, fees, dowries, jointures, and legacies to be paid, with annuities draining away their income. These leave them unable to maintain the splendour of their predecessors, or to educate and establish their children in occupations suited to their birth and rank; yet they refuse to bring their way of life down to match their present means.

Other troubles often combine to make the rest worse: ungrateful friends, impoverished friends, bad neighbours, negligent servants—thieving servants, slippery and cunning, who open things locked against them with a thousand keys, secretly pilfer, consume, and gorge themselves;

accidents, taxes, fines, costly offices, wasteful expenditure, entertaining, loss of stock, enmities, rivalries, frequent invitations, losses, standing surety, sickness, the death of friends, and that gulf which swallows everything: lack of foresight, bad management, disorder, and confusion. Through these their fortunes suddenly founder, and before they realise it they are plunged into an inescapable labyrinth of debts, cares, sorrows, want, grief, discontent, and melancholy itself.

I have finished with households, and will now briefly survey a few kinds and conditions of people. The world considers princes and great men the safest, happiest, most cheerful and merry of all, free from melancholy. But for their cares, miseries, suspicions, jealousies, discontents, folly, and madness, I refer you to Xenophon’s Tyrant, where King Hiero discusses this subject at length with the poet Simonides.

More than anyone else, they are troubled by perpetual fears and anxieties, so much so that, as the speaker in Valerius says, if you knew what cares and miseries were packed into this robe, you would not stoop to pick it up.

Or suppose they are secure and free from fear and discontent: even then they are too often without reason and rash in their actions. Read all our histories, the accounts fools have handed down about fools—our Iliads, Aeneids, and annals—and what is their subject? The passions of foolish kings and peoples.

Almost every page bears witness to their madness and fury, their rash and thoughtless actions over trifles, their folly: kings rave, and the Greeks are punished.

Next in rank, and next in misery, discontent, and every kind of reckless behaviour, come the great men. Far from Jupiter, far from the thunderbolt: the nearer, the worse. If they live at court, they rise and fall, ebb and flow with their prince’s favour. Their talent stands or falls with his expression: up today, down tomorrow. As Polybius describes them, they are like reckoning counters, gold today and silver tomorrow, worth whatever the person calculating chooses: now small coins, tomorrow thousands; now ahead of everyone, and a moment later behind.

They also torment one another with factions and rivalries: one is ambitious, another in love, a third in debt, a prodigal outrunning his fortune, a fourth distracted by cares and gaining nothing, and so on. For their discontents and anxieties, I refer you to Lucian’s treatise On Salaried Posts, Aeneas Sylvius, who calls them slaves of desire and folly, Agrippa, and many others.

I have already spoken in general of philosophers and scholars, those arbiters of ancient wisdom, those overseers of intellect and learning, men above other men, those refined souls, the Muses’ favourites, To whom it has been granted to have good minds And to rank among the wise.

These much-honoured, sharp and subtle disputants need hellebore as much as anyone else. Physicians, open the middle vein! Read Lucian’s Fisherman and see what he thought of them, or Agrippa’s treatise on the vanity of the sciences. Better still, read their own works, their absurd doctrines and monstrous paradoxes: can you keep from laughing, friends?

You will find Aristotle’s saying true: there is no great intellect without an admixture of madness. They have a worm in the head like everyone else. You will find some fanciful streak, inflated rhetoric, bombast, vanity, or affected style running through their works like a raised thread in unevenly woven cloth.

Those who teach wisdom, patience, and meekness are the greatest fools, scatterbrains, and malcontents. In much wisdom there is grief, and whoever increases wisdom increases sorrow. I need not name my authority. Those who laugh at and despise others, condemning the world for its folly, deserve to be mocked themselves: they are as flighty and as open to attack as anyone.

Democritus, that habitual mocker of folly, was himself ridiculous. Barking Menippus, scoffing Lucian, the satirists Lucilius, Petronius, Varro, Persius, and the rest may all be criticised with the others. Let the straight-legged man mock the cripple, and the white man the Ethiopian.

Bale, Erasmus, Hospinian, Vives, and Chemnitz denounce scholastic theology as a vast ocean of objections and solutions, a labyrinth of tangled questions and fruitless disputes; one calls it incredible delirium.

If scholastic theology is judged so harshly—subtle Scotus, the file that sharpens truth; irrefutable Ockham, whose intellect overturned all earlier intellects; Baconthorpe, the Resolute Doctor and keen mind of theology; Thomas himself, the Seraphic Doctor, to whom an angel dictated—what will become of humanistic learning? Foolish art, what can she plead? What can her followers say in their defence?

Much learning has broken their brains apart, cracked their skulls, and taken such deep root that the head cannot be cured by three Anticyras. Hellebore itself can do no good, nor even that celebrated lamp of Epictetus, by whose light anyone who studied was supposed to become as wise as he was.

But none of this will do. Rhetoricians discuss all sorts of things to show off their fluency; their nimble tongues talk at length to no purpose. Orators can persuade others of whatever they please, lead them wherever they wish and from wherever they wish, stir them up, calm them down, and so on; yet they cannot settle their own minds. What does Cicero say? I prefer wisdom without eloquence to eloquent folly. Seneca supports him: a wise person’s speech should not be elaborately polished or anxiously contrived.