Unkind, unnatural friends, wicked neighbours, bad servants, debts and disputes, and so on. It was Chilon’s saying: “Misery is the companion of debt and litigation.” Misery and moneylending at interest commonly go together. Standing surety is the ruin of many families: “Give a guarantee, and harm is at hand.” He who stands surety for a stranger will suffer sorely, Proverbs 11:15; and he who hates giving guarantees is safe.

Contention, brawling, lawsuits, quarrels between neighbours and friends—“maddened Discord” (Virgil, Aeneid 6)—are equal to the former troubles: they grieve many a man and torment his soul. “Surely nothing is more wretched than their minds,” as Botero maintains. Nothing is so miserable as such men, full of cares, griefs and anxieties, as though stabbed with a sharp sword; fear, suspicion, despair and sorrow are their constant companions.

Some of their own writers remark that our Welshmen ruin one another in this way. But whoever engages in it, these are their usual symptoms, especially when found guilty or defeated—when they lose a lawsuit. Arius, deprived of a bishopric by Eustathius, became a heretic and afterwards lived discontentedly all his life.

Every rejection has the same effect: “Alas, from what great hopes have I fallen!” Disgrace, dishonour and slander will do almost as much, and their effects last long afterwards. Hipponax, a satirical poet, so vilified and scourged two painters in his iambic verses “that both strangled themselves with a noose,” Pliny says: both hanged themselves.

All opposition, dangers, perplexities, discontents, and living in any uncertainty belong to the same class: “Can you sleep in such a crisis?” Who can feel secure in such circumstances? Benefits bestowed on the undeserving, ingratitude and unthankful friends greatly disturb and distress some people.

Unkind words trouble just as many. Rude behaviour or surly answers—especially for frail women, when these come from their ill-tempered husbands—are as bitter as gall and cannot be digested. A glassworker’s wife in Basel became melancholy because her husband said he would marry again if she died.

No wound cuts like unkindness, as the saying goes. A frown or harsh word, discourtesy, browbeating or an angry look is instant death, especially to courtiers or those who serve the great.

Talent rises and falls with his expression.

They ebb and flow with their masters’ favour. Some people are at their wits’ end if they happen to go too far in their ordinary words or actions, in a way that may later bring them disadvantage or disgrace, or if some secret of theirs is revealed.

Ronsse, Miscellaneous Letters 3, reports the case of a gentlewoman of twenty-five who quarrelled with one of her female friends and was publicly reproached with a secret infirmity—no matter what. She was so distressed by it that she began “to seek solitude, send everyone away from her, and at last, falling into the deepest melancholy, waste away”: she forsook all company, became utterly withdrawn, and pined away in a melancholy state.

Others are just as tormented to find themselves rejected, despised, scorned, disparaged, defamed, slandered, undervalued, or left behind their fellows. In his Symposium, or The Lapiths, Lucian introduces the philosopher Aetamacles, deeply displeased at not being invited with the others, protesting about it in a long letter to their host Aristaenetus.

Praetextatus, a gentleman in a robe in Plutarch, would not sit down at a feast because he could not take the highest place, but went away in a fury. We see the everyday quarrels among us over taking the wall, precedence and the like: although trifles in themselves and matters of no importance, they cause many disturbances and much resentment among us.

Nothing cuts deeper than contempt or disgrace, especially in people of noble spirit; scarcely anything affects them more than being despised or vilified. Crato, consultation 16, book 2, gives an example, and common experience confirms it.

Of the same nature is oppression—Ecclesiastes 7:7, “Surely oppression makes a man mad”—and loss of liberty, which made Brutus risk his life, Cato kill himself, and Cicero lament, “I have lost all cheerfulness for ever”: my heart is broken; I shall never lift my head or be merry again. “This loss is unbearable”: to some people it is a most intolerable loss.

Banishment is a great misery, as Tyrtaeus describes it in a poem of his:

For it is wretched, country and home lost, to wander A beggar, and ask for food in a timid voice. Wherever the exile goes, he will always be hated By all; always despised, he lies in want, and so on.

A miserable thing it is to wander so, And like a beggar whine from door to door; Despised by all the world, an exile is Hated, rejected, always needy, poor.

In his conversation with Jocasta in Euripides, Polynices lists five miseries of a banished man, the least of which alone would be enough to cast down some faint-hearted creatures. Often an excessive awareness of our own infirmities or imperfections of body or mind will shrivel us up, as when we are ill for a long time.

O blessed health, in your presence pleasant Spring blooms with charms; without you no one is happy.