88 Lales. from Shakespeare.

Who can call any man friend that dips in the same dish
with him? just of this metal is every flatterer. In the
recollection of everybody Timon had been a father to this
Lucius, had kept up his credit with his purse; Timon’s
money had gone to pay the wages of his servants, to. pay
the hire of the laborers who had sweat to build the fine
houses which Lucius’ pride had made necessary to him;
yet—oh! the monster which man makes himself when he
proves ungrateful !—this Lucius now denied to Timon a

.sum which, in respect of what Timon had bestowed on
him, was less than charitable men afford to beggars.

Sempronius and every one of these mercenary lords to
whom Timon applied in their turn, returned the same
evasive answer or direct denial; even Ventidius, the re-
deemed and now rich Ventidius, refused to assist him with
the loan of those five talents which Timon had not lent,
but generously given him in his distress.

Now was Timon as much avoided in his poverty as he
had been courted and resorted to in his riches. Now the
same tongues which had been loudest in his praises, ex-
tolling him as bountiful, liberal and open-handed, were not
ashamed to censure that very bounty as folly, that liber-
ality as profuseness, though it had shown itself folly in
nothing so truly as in the selection of such unworthy
creatures as themselves for its objects. Now was Timon’s
princely mansion forsaken, and become a shunned and
hated place, a place for men to pass by, not a place as
formerly where every passenger must stop and taste of
his wine and good cheer ; now, instead of being thronged
with feasting and tumultuous guests, it was beset with
impatient and clamorous creditors, usurers, extortioners,
fierce and intolerable in their demands, pleading bonds,
interest, mortgages, iron-hearted men that would take no
denial nor putting off, that Timon’s house was now his
jail, which he could not pass nor go in nor out for them ;
one demanding his due of fifty talents, another bringing
in a bill of five thousand crowns, which if he would sel]