THE PROEM.

I have showed you many fair virtues: I speak not for them; if their

sight cannot command affection let them lose it. They shall please yet

better after you have troubled your eyes a little with the view of

deformities; and by how much more they please, so much more odious and

like themselves shall these deformities appear. This light contraries

give to each other in the midst of their enmity, that one makes the

other seem more good or ill. Perhaps in some of these (which thing I do

at once fear and hate) my style shall seem to some less grave, more

satirical: if you find me, not without cause, jealous, let it please you

to impute it to the nature of those vices which will not be otherwise

handled. The fashions of some evils are, besides the odiousness,

ridiculous, which to repeat is to seem bitterly merry. I abhor to make

sport with wickedness, and forbid any laughter here but of disdain.

Hypocrisy shall lead this ring worthily, I think, because both she

cometh nearest to virtue and is the worst of vices.

Character Writings of the Seventeenth Century · 第 140 / 429 题