Good Councel is lost upon an Habitual Hardness of Ill Nature: And in That
Case it must be a Diamond that Cuts a Diamond: for One Fraud is best
Undermin’d and Disappointed by Another. This Fable is a Figure upon a
Figure, in Opposing the Straitness of the Body of the _Snake_ after he
was Dead, to the Crookedness of his Manners when he was Living. But the
License of _Mythology_ will bear out the Hardness of the Allusion.