Cowleys Essays | Page 8

beginning from door to door. This particular
humble way to greatness is now out of fashion, but yet every ambitious
person is still in some sort a Roman candidate. He must feast and bribe,
and attend and flatter, and adore many beasts, though not the beast with
many heads. Catiline, who was so proud that he could not content
himself with a less power than Sylla's, was yet so humble for the
attaining of it, as to make himself the most contemptible of all servants,
to be a public bawd for all the young gentlemen of Rome whose hot
lusts, and courages, and heads, he thought he might make use of. And
since I happen here to propose Catiline for my instance, though there be
thousand of examples for the same thing, give me leave to transcribe
the character which Cicero gives of this noble slave, because it is a
general description of all ambitious men, and which Machiavel perhaps
would say ought to be the rule of their life and actions. "This man,"
says he, as most of you may well remember, "had many artificial
touches and strokes that looked like the beauty of great virtues; his
intimate conversation was with the worst of men, and yet he seemed to
be an admirer and lover of the best; he was furnished with all the nets
of lust and luxury, and yet wanted not the arms of labour and industry:
neither do I believe that there was ever any monster in nature,
composed out of so many different and disagreeing parts. Who more
acceptable, sometimes, to the most honourable persons? who more a
favourite to the most infamous? who, sometimes, appeared a braver
champion? who, at other times, a bolder enemy to his country? who
more dissolute in his pleasures? who more patient in his toils? who

more rapacious in robbing? who more profuse in giving? Above all
things, this was remarkable and admirable in him. The arts he had to
acquire the good opinion and kindness of all sorts of men, to retain it
with great complaisance, to communicate all things to them, to watch
and serve all the occasions of their fortune, both with his money and his
interest, and his industry, and if need were, not by sticking at any
wickedness whatsoever that might be useful to them, to bend and turn
about his own nature and laveer with every wind, to live severely with
the melancholy, merrily with the pleasant, gravely with the aged,
wantonly with the young, desperately with the bold, and debauchedly
with the luxurious. With this variety and multiplicity of his nature, as
he had made a collection of friendships with all the most wicked and
reckless of all nations, so, by the artificial simulation of some virtues,
he made a shift to ensnare some honest and eminent persons into his
familiarity; neither could so vast a design as the destruction of this
empire have been undertaken by him, if the immanity of so many vices
had not been covered and disguised by the appearances of some
excellent qualities."
I see, methinks, the character of an Anti-Paul, who became all things to
all men, that he might destroy all; who only wanted the assistance of
fortune to have been as great as his friend Caesar was, a little after him.
And the ways of Caesar to compass the same ends--I mean till the civil
war, which was but another manner of setting his country on fire--were
not unlike these, though he used afterward his unjust dominion with
more moderation than I think the other would have done. Sallust,
therefore, who was well acquainted with them both and with many
such-like gentlemen of his time, says, "That it is the nature of
ambition" (Ambitio multos mortales falsos fieri coegit, etc.) "to make
men liars and cheaters; to hide the truth in their breasts, and show, like
jugglers, another thing in their mouths; to cut all friendships and
enmities to the measure of their own interest, and to make a good
countenance without the help of good will." And can there be freedom
with this perpetual constraint? What is it but a kind of rack that forces
men to say what they have no mind to? I have wondered at the
extravagant and barbarous stratagem of Zopirus, and more at the
praises which I find of so deformed an action; who, though he was one
of the seven grandees of Persia, and the son of Megabises, who had

freed before his country from an ignoble servitude, slit his own nose
and lips, cut off his own ears, scourged and wounded his whole body,
that he might, under pretence of having been mangled so inhumanly by
Darius, be received into Babylon (then besieged by the Persians) and
get