Is the grave of the living,[78] where they are shut up from the world
and their friends; and the worms that gnaw upon them their own thoughts
and the jailor. A house of meagre looks and ill smells, for lice, drink,
and tobacco are the compound. Plato's court was expressed from this
fancy; and the persons are much about the same parity that is there. You
may ask, as Menippus in Lucian, which is Nireus, which Thersites, which
the beggar, which the knight;--for they are all suited in the same form
of a kind of nasty poverty. Only to be out at elbows is in fashion here,
and a great indecorum not to be thread-bare. Every man shews here like
so many wrecks upon the sea, here the ribs of a thousand pound, here the
relicks of so many manors, a doublet without buttons; and 'tis a
spectacle of more pity than executions are. The company one with the
other is but a vying of complaints, and the causes they have to rail on
fortune and fool themselves, and there is a great deal of good
fellowship in this. They are commonly, next their creditors, most bitter
against the lawyers, as men that have had a great stroke in assisting
them hither. Mirth here is stupidity or hardheartedness, yet they feign
it sometimes to slip melancholy, and keep off themselves from
themselves, and the torment of thinking what they have been. Men huddle
up their life here as a thing of no use, and wear it out like an old
suit, the faster the better; and he that deceives the time best, best
spends it. It is the place where new comers are most welcomed, and, next
them, ill news, as that which extends their fellowship in misery, and
leaves few to insult:--and they breath their discontents more securely
here, and have their tongues at more liberty than abroad. Men see here
much sin and much calamity; and where the last does not mortify, the
other hardens; as those that are worse here, are desperately worse, and
those from whom the horror of sin is taken off and the punishment
familiar: and commonly a hard thought passes on all that come from this
school; which though it teach much wisdom, it is too late, and with
danger: and it is better be a fool than come here to learn it.