Sir Thomas.

“All this, methinks, is for the behoof of clerks and ministers.”

William Shakspeare.

“He taught them what they who teach others should learn and practise.  Then did he look toward the young gentlemen of large fortune; and lastly his glances fell upon us poorer folk, whom he instructed in the duty we owe to our superiors.”

Sir Thomas.

“Ay, there he had a host.”

William Shakspeare.

“In one part of his admonition he said, —

“’Young gentlemen! let not the highest of you who hear me this evening be led into the delusion, for such it is, that the founder of his family was originally a greater or a better man than the lowest here.  He willed it, and became it.  He must have stood low; he must have worked hard,—­and with tools, moreover, of his own invention and fashioning.  He waved and whistled off ten thousand strong and importunate temptations; he dashed the dice-box from the jewelled hand of Chance, the cup from Pleasure’s, and trod under foot the sorceries of each; he ascended steadily the precipices of Danger, and looked down with intrepidity from the summit; he overawed Arrogance with Sedateness; he seized by the horn and overleaped low Violence; and he fairly swung Fortune round.

“’The very high cannot rise much higher; the very low may,—­the truly great must have done it.

“’This is not the doctrine, my friends, of the silkenly and lawnly religious; it wears the coarse texture of the fisherman, and walks uprightly and straightforward under it.  I am speaking now more particularly to you among us upon whom God hath laid the incumbrances of wealth, the sweets whereof bring teazing and poisonous things about you, not easily sent away.  What now are your pretensions under sacks of money? or your enjoyments under the shade of genealogical trees?  Are they rational?  Are they real?  Do they exist at all?  Strange inconsistency! to be proud of having as much gold and silver laid upon you as a mule hath, and yet to carry it less composedly!  The mule is not answerable for the conveyance and discharge of his burden,—­you are.  Stranger infatuation still! to be prouder of an excellent thing done by another than by yourselves, supposing any excellent thing to have actually been done; and, after all, to be more elated on his cruelties than his kindnesses, by the blood he hath spilt than by the benefits he had conferred; and to acknowledge less obligation to a well-informed and well-intentioned progenitor than to a lawless and ferocious barbarian.  Would stocks and stumps, if they could utter words, utter such gross stupidity?  Would the apple boast of his crab origin, or the peach of his prune?  Hardly any man is ashamed of being inferior to his ancestors, although it is the very thing at which the great should blush, if, indeed, the great in general descended