CHAPTER 20For, to speak in a word, envy is naught else but tristitia de bonis alienis, sorrow for other men’s good, be it present past, or to come: and gaudium de adversis, and joy at their harms.... ‘Tis a common disease, and almost natural to us, as Tacitus holds, to envy another man’s prosperity.
—Robert Burton
It is said that love and a cough cannot be hid. Nor is it easy to hide two-and-thirty outside ivory chessmen; unless one is so inhuman as to leave them swaddled in their mummy-clothes of wadding and entombed within the six sides of a wooden sarcophagus. What is the use of acquiring one’s heart’s desire if one cannot handle and gloat over it, show it to one’s friends and gather an anthology of envy and admiration? Whatever awkward deductions might be drawn about the giver—and, a
