IF this unhappy worm had been as despicable as the other reptiles that crept up and down the hedge whence I took him, he might as well as they have been left there still, and his own obscurity as well as that of the night had preserved him from the confinement he now suffers. And if, as he sometimes for a pretty while withdrew that luminous liquor, that is as it were the candle to this dark lanthorn, he had continued to forbear the disclosing of it, he might have deluded my search and escaped his present confinement.

  Rare qualities may sometimes be prerogatives without being advantages. And though a needless ostentation of one’s excellencies may be more glorious, yet a modest concealment of them is usually more safe, and an unseasonable disclosure of flashes of wit may sometimes do a man no other service than to direct his adversaries how they may do him a mischief.

  And as though this worm be lodged in a crystalline prison, through which it has the honor to be gazed at by many eyes, and among them are some that are said to shine far more in the day than this creature does in the night, yet no doubt, if he could express a sense of the condition he is in, he would bewail it, and think himself unhappy in an excellency which procures him at once admiration and captivity, by the former of which he does but give others a pleasure, while in the latter he himself resents a misery.

  This ofttimes is the fate of a great wit, whom the advantage he has of ordinary men in knowledge, the light of the mind exposes to so many effects of other men’s importunate curiosity as to turn his prerogative into a trouble; the light that ennobles him tempts inquisitive men to keep him as upon the score we do this glow worm from sleeping, and his conspicuousness is not more a friend to his fame than an enemy to his quiet, for men allow such much praise but little rest. They attract the eyes of others, but are not suffered to shut their own, and find that by a very disadvantageous bargain they are reduced for that imaginary good called fame, to pay that real blessing, liberty.

  And as though this luminous creature be himself imprisoned in so close a body as glass, yet the light that ennobles him is not thereby restrained from diffusing itself, so there are certain truths that have in them so much of native light or evidence that by the personal distress of the proposer it cannot be hidden or restrained, but in spite of prisons it shines freely, and procures the teachers of it admiration even when it cannot procure them liberty.