VII. Why do you not also mention the convenience
of the site, and what I may call the contest between land and sea as to
which owns the City, and which adorns our Royal City with all their
good things? This then is our crime, that while you are great and
splendid, we are small and come from a small place? Many others
do you this wrong, indeed all those whom you excel; and must we die
because we have not reared a
city, nor built walls around it, nor can boast of our racecourse, or
our stadia, and pack of hounds, and all the follies that are connected
with these things; nor have to boast of the beauty and splendour of our
baths, and the costliness of their marbles and pictures and golden
embroideries of all sorts of species, almost rivalling nature?
Nor have we yet rounded off the sea for ourselves, or mingled the
seasons, as of course you, the new Creators, have done, that we may
live in what is at once the pleasantest and the safest way. Add
if you like other charges, you who say, The silver is mine and the gold
is mine, Hagg. ii. 8. those words of
God. We neither think much of riches, on which, if they increase,
our Law forbids us to set our hearts, nor do we count up yearly and
daily revenues; nor do we rival one another in loading our tables with
enchantments for our senseless belly. For neither do we highly
esteem those things which after we have swallowed them are all of the
same worth, or rather I should say worthlessness, and are
rejected. But we live so simply and from hand to mouth, as to
differ but little from beasts whose sustenance is without apparatus and
inartificial.