Now, as fond fathers,

Having bound up the threatening twigs of birch,

Only to stick it in their children's sight

For terror, not to use, in time the rod

Becomes more mocked than feared; so our decrees,

Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead;

And liberty plucks justice by the nose;

The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart

Goes all decorum.

Our doubts are traitors

And makes us lose the good we oft might win

By fearing to attempt.

When maidens sue,

Men give like gods; but when they weep and kneel,

All their petitions are as freely theirs

As they themselves would owe them.

We must not make a scarecrow of the law,

Setting it up to fear the birds of prey,

And let it keep one shape, till custom make it

Their perch and not their terror.

The jury, passing on the prisoner's life,

May in the sworn twelve have a thief or two

Guiltier than him they try.

The jewel that we find, we stoop and take 't

Because we see it; but what we do not see

We tread upon and never think of it.

Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.

Mercy is not itself that oft looks so;

Pardon is still the nurse of second woe.

No ceremony that to great ones 'longs,

Not the king's crown, nor the deputed sword,

The marshal's truncheon, nor the judge's robe,

Become them with one half so good a grace

As mercy does.

The law hath not been dead, though it hath slept.

O, it is excellent

To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous

To use it like a giant.

Could great men thunder

As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet,

For every pelting, petty officer

Would use his heaven for thunder,

Nothing but thunder!--Merciful Heaven,

Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt

Split'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak

Than the soft myrtle; but man, proud man,

Drest in a little brief authority,

Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd,

His glassy essence, like an angry ape,

Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven

As make the angels weep, who, with our spleens,

Would all themselves laugh mortal.

Great men may jest with saints; 't is wit in them,

But in the less foul profanation.

That in the captain's but a choleric word

Which in the soldier is flat blasphemy.

Authority, though it err like others,

Hath yet a kind of medicine in itself

That skins the vice o' the top.

Is this her fault or mine?

The tempter or the tempted, who sins most? Ha!

Not she; nor doth she tempt; but it is I

That, lying by the violet in the sun,

Do as the carrion does, not as the flower,

Corrupt with virtuous season.

Thieves for their robbery have authority

When judges steal themselves.

O cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint,

With saints dost bait thy hook!

Most dangerous

Is that temptation that doth goad us on

To sin in loving nature.

O perilous mouths,

That bear in them one and the self-same tongue,

Either of condemnation or approof;

Bidding the law make court'sy to their will,

Hooking both right and wrong to the appetite,

To follow as it draws!

The miserable have no other medicine,

But only hope.

Be absolute for death; either death or life

Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life:

If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing

That none but fools would keep: a breath thou art,

Servile to all the skyey influences,

That dost this habitation where thou keep'st

Hourly afflict. Merely, thou art death's fool;

For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun,

And yet runn'st toward him still.

If thou art rich, thou 'rt poor;

For, like an ass whose back with ingots bows,

Thou bear'st thy heavy riches but a journey,

And death unloads thee.

The sense of death is most in apprehension,

And the poor beetle that we tread upon

In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great

As when a giant dies.

If I must die,

I will encounter darkness as a bride,

And hug it in mine arms.

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;

To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;

This sensible warm motion to become

A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit

To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside

In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;

To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,

And blown with restless violence round about

The pendent world; or to be worse than worst

Of those that lawless and incertain thought

Imagine howling!--'t is too horrible!

The weariest and most loathed worldly life

That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment

Can lay on nature is a paradise

To what we fear of death.

Virtue is bold, and goodness never fearful.

No might nor greatness in mortality

Can censure scape; back-wounding calumny

The whitest virtue strikes. What king so strong

Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue?

He who the sword of heaven will bear

Should be as holy as severe,

Pattern in himself to know

Grace to stand, and virtue go;

More nor less to others paying

Than by self-offenses weighing.

Shame to him whose cruel striking

Kills for faults of his own liking!

O, what may man within him hide,

Though angel on the outward side!

There is scarce truth enough alive to make societies secure, but security enough to make fellowship accurst.

Music oft hath such a charm

To make bad good, and good provoke to harm.

Truth is truth

To the end of reckoning.

Harp not on that, nor do not banish reason

For inequality; but let your reason serve

To make the truth appear where it seems hid,

And hide the false seems true.

They say, best men are moulded out of faults,

And, for the most, become much more the better

For being a little bad.

Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure;

Like doth quit like, and measure still for measure.

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