IT HAD been hard for him that spake it to have put more truth and untruth together in few words, than in that speech, Whatsoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.  For it is most true, that a natural and secret hatred, and aversation towards society, in any man, hath somewhat of the savage beast; but it is most untrue, that it should have any character at all, of the divine nature; except it proceed, not out of a pleasure in solitude, but out of a love and desire to sequester a man's self, for a higher conversation: such as is found to have been falsely and feignedly in some of the heathen; as Epimenides the Canadian, Numa the Roman, Empedocles the Sicilian, and Apollonius of Tyana;  and truly and really, in divers of the ancient hermits and holy fathers of the church.  But little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth.  For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.  The Latin adage meeteth with it a

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