The people is a beast of muddy brain,
That knows not its own force, and therefore stands
Loaded with wood and stone; the powerless hands
Of a mere child guide it with bit and rein:
One kick would be enough to break the chain;
But the beast fears, and what the child demands,
It does; nor its own terror understands.
Confused and stupefied by bugbears vain.
Most wonderful! with its own hand it ties
And gags itself — gives itself death and war
For pence doled out by kings from its own store.
Its own are all things between earth and heaven;
But this it knows not; and if one arise
To tell this truth, it kills him unforgiven.
“I do not think altogether the worse of a book for having survived the author a generation or two. I have more confidence in the dead than the living.” — Hazlitt
20 February 2014
A Beast of Muddy Brain
Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639), "The People," The Sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonarroti and Tommaso Campanella, tr. John Addington Symonds (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1878), p. 143: