Page 82 - UTOPIA

valued themselves, and accordingly laid it aside—a resolu-
tion that they immediately took when, on their engaging
in some free discourse with the Utopians, they discovered
their sense of such things and their other customs. The Uto-
pians wonder how any man should be so much taken with
the glaring doubtful lustre of a jewel or a stone, that can
look up to a star or to the sun himself; or how any should
value himself because his cloth is made of a finer thread; for,
how fine soever that thread may be, it was once no better
than the fleece of a sheep, and that sheep, was a sheep still,
for all its wearing it. They wonder much to hear that gold,
which in itself is so useless a thing, should be everywhere so
much esteemed that even man, for whom it was made, and
by whom it has its value, should yet be thought of less value
than this metal; that a man of lead, who has no more sense
than a log of wood, and is as bad as he is foolish, should have
many wise and good men to serve him, only because he has
a great heap of that metal; and that if it should happen that
by some accident or trick of law (which, sometimes produc-
es as great changes as chance itself) all this wealth should
pass from the master to the meanest varlet of his whole fam-
ily, he himself would very soon become one of his servants,
as if he were a thing that belonged to his wealth, and so were
bound to follow its fortune! But they much more admire
and detest the folly of those who, when they see a rich man,
though they neither owe him anything, nor are in any sort
dependent on his bounty, yet, merely because he is rich, give
him little less than divine honours, even though they know
him to be so covetous and base-minded that, notwithstand-

82 Utopia