“Ventus ut amittit vires, nisi robore densa
          Occurrant sylvae, spatio diffusus inani.”

["As the wind loses its force diffused in void space, unless it in
its strength encounters the thick wood.”—­Lucan, iii. 362.]

So it seems that the soul, being transported and discomposed, turns its violence upon itself, if not supplied with something to oppose it, and therefore always requires an object at which to aim, and whereon to act.  Plutarch says of those who are delighted with little dogs and monkeys, that the amorous part that is in us, for want of a legitimate object, rather than lie idle, does after that manner forge and create one false and frivolous.  And we see that the soul, in its passions, inclines rather to deceive itself, by creating a false and fantastical a subject, even contrary to its own belief, than not to have something to work upon.  After this manner brute beasts direct their fury to fall upon the stone or weapon that has hurt them, and with their teeth a even execute revenge upon themselves for the injury they have received from another: 

         “Pannonis haud aliter, post ictum saevior ursa,
          Cui jaculum parva Lybis amentavit habena,
          Se rotat in vulnus, telumque irata receptum
          Impetit, et secum fugientem circuit hastam.”

["So the she-bear, fiercer after the blow from the Lybian’s thong-
hurled dart, turns round upon the wound, and attacking the received
spear, twists it, as she flies.”—­Lucan, vi. 220.]

What causes of the misadventures that befall us do we not invent? what is it that we do not lay the fault to, right or wrong, that we may have something to quarrel with?  It is not those beautiful tresses you tear, nor is it the white bosom that in your anger you so unmercifully beat, that with an unlucky bullet have slain your beloved brother; quarrel with something else.  Livy, speaking of the Roman army in Spain, says that for the loss of the two brothers, their great captains: 

          “Flere omnes repente, et offensare capita.”

     ["All at once wept and tore their hair."-Livy, xxv. 37.]

’Tis a common practice.  And the philosopher Bion said pleasantly of the king, who by handsful pulled his hair off his head for sorrow, “Does this man think that baldness is a remedy for grief?”—­[Cicero, Tusc.  Quest., iii. 26.]—­Who has not seen peevish gamesters chew and swallow the cards, and swallow the dice, in revenge for the loss of their money?  Xerxes whipped the sea, and wrote a challenge to Mount Athos; Cyrus employed a whole army several days at work, to revenge himself of the river Gyndas, for the fright it had put him into in passing over it; and Caligula demolished a very beautiful palace for the pleasure his mother had once enjoyed there.

     —­[Pleasure—­unless ‘plaisir’ were originally ’deplaisir’—­must be
     understood here ironically, for the house was one in which she had
     been imprisoned.—­Seneca, De Ira. iii. 22]—­