Kaina kai palaia Things new and old, or, A store-house of similies, sentences, allegories, apophthegms, adagies, apologues, divine, morall, politicall, &c. : with their severall applications / collected and observed from the writings and sayings of the learned in all ages to this present by John Spencer ...

[ 1082] Slanderers discovered.

IT is Aelians observation, how that men being in danger to be stung by Scorpions,* 1.1 use to place their beds in water, yet the politick Serpents have a device to reach them; they get up to the top of the house, where one takes hold, the next hangs at the end of him, a third upon the second, a fourth upon the third; and so ma∣king a kind of Serpentine rope, they at the last wound the man. And thus it is, that amongst scandalizers and slanderers, one begins to whisper, another makes it a report,* 1.2 a third enlargeth it to a dangerous calumny, a fourth divulgeth it for a truth: So the innocent mans good name, which, like a Merchants wealth, got in many years, and lost in an houre, is maimed, and so secretly traduced, that it is somewhat hard to find out the villain that did it.

Notes

• * 1.1

  In var. hist. Ephr. Udall Ser. at S. August Lond. 1639.
• * 1.2

  Inimici famam non i••a, ut nata est, ferunt. Plaut.