Читать книгу The Totall Discourse of the Rare Adventures & Painefull Peregrinations. The Long Nineteene Yeares Travayles from Scotland to the most famous Kingdomes in Europe, Asia and Affrica онлайн

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Per varios casus, per tot discrimina rerum,

Tendimus in latium, &c.

By diverse wayes, and dangers great we mind,

To visit Latium, and Latinus kind.

In all this countrey of Greece I could finde nothing, [II. 72.]to answer the famous relations, given by auncient Authors, of the excellency of that land, but the name onely; the barbarousnesse of Turkes and Time, having defaced all the Monuments of Antiquity: No shew or honour, no habitation of men in an honest fashion, nor possessours of the Countrey in a Principality. But rather prisoners shut up in prisons, or addicted slaves to cruell and tyrannicall Maisters: So deformed is the state of that once worthy Realme, and so miserable is the burthen of that afflicted people: which, and the apparance of that permanency, grieved my heart to behold the sinister working of blind Fortune, which alwayes plungeth the most renowned Champions, and their memory, in the profoundest pit of all extremities and oblivion.

Greeke Champions.Let the Ghosts of that Theban Epaminondas, that Mirmidonian Phillip, & these Epirean worthies, Pyrhus and Scanderberg, be witnesses hereto; but especially, that Macedonian Alexander, whose fortunes ever followed him, rather than fled him til his last dissolution; wherein I may say his greatnesse rose; Like to a mighty and huge Oke, being cled with the exuvials, and Trophees of enemies fenced with an army of boughes garnished with a coat of barke as hard as Steele; despising the force and power of the Winds, as being onely able to dally with the leaves, and not to weaken the roote: But the Northerne wind, that strong Champion of the airy Region, secretly lurking in the vault of some hollow cloude, doth first murmure at this aspiring Oke, and then striketh his Crest with some greater strength; and lastly, with the deepest breath of his Lungs, doth blow up the roote: Even so was it with Alexander, who from a stripling came to be a Cedar, and from the sorrow of no more worlds, was soone cut off from the world he was into: For destiny [II. 73.]is no mans drudge, and death is every mans conquerour, matching the Scepter, with the Spade, and the crowned Prince with the praislesse Peasant: And in a word, there was never any to whom fortune did sooner approach, nor never any from whom she did more suddenly flee, then from Alexander, leaving him a cleare mirrour of the worlds inconstancy.