amphimacer. So much knowledge could only end in starvation. The school

of Salerno says, "Eat little and often." Ursus ate little and seldom,

thus obeying one half the precept and disobeying the other; but this was

the fault of the public, who did not always flock to him, and who did

not often buy.

Ursus was wont to say: "The expectoration of a sentence is a relief. The

wolf is comforted by its howl, the sheep by its wool, the forest by its

finch, woman by her love, and the philosopher by his epiphonema." Ursus

at a pinch composed comedies, which, in recital, he all but acted; this

helped to sell the drugs. Among other works, he had composed an heroic

pastoral in honour of Sir Hugh Middleton, who in 1608 brought a river to

London. The river was lying peacefully in Hertfordshire, twenty miles

from London: the knight came and took possession of it. He brought a

brigade of six hundred men, armed with shovels and pickaxes; set to

breaking up the ground, scooping it out in one place, raising it in

another--now thirty feet high, now twenty feet deep; made wooden

aqueducts high in air; and at different points constructed eight hundred

bridges of stone, bricks, and timber. One fine morning the river entered

London, which was short of water. Ursus transformed all these vulgar

details into a fine Eclogue between the Thames and the New River, in

which the former invited the latter to come to him, and offered her his

bed, saying, "I am too old to please women, but I am rich enough to pay

them"--an ingenious and gallant conceit to indicate how Sir Hugh

Middleton had completed the work at his own expense.

Ursus was great in soliloquy. Of a disposition at once unsociable and

The Man Who Laughs