THE SECOND BOOK.


CHARACTERISMS OF VICES.



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 OF THE HYPOCRITE.