Let us but hear
old Anchises speaking in the midst of Troy's flames, or see Ulysses,
in the fulness of all Calypso's delights, bewail his absence from
barren and beggarly Ithaca. Anger, the Stoics say, was a short madness;
let but Sophocles bring you Ajax on a stage, killing and whipping sheep
and oxen, thinking them the army of Greeks, with their chieftains
Agamemnon and Menelaus, and tell me if you have not a more familiar
insight into anger, than finding in the schoolmen his genus and
difference. See whether wisdom and temperance in Ulysses and Diomedes,
valour in Achilles, friendship in Nisus and Euryalus, even to an
ignorant man, carry not an apparent shining: and contrarily, the remorse
of conscience in Odipus, the soon repenting pride of Agamemnon, the
self-devouring cruelty in his father Atreus, the violence of ambition
in the two Theban brothers, the sour-sweetness of revenge in Medea,
and to fall lower, the Terentian Gnatho and our Chaucer's Pandar, so
expressed, that we now use their names to signify their trades. And
finally, all virtues, vices, and passions so in their own natural seats
laid to the view, that we seem not to hear of them, but clearly to see
through them.
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