|
|
Fantasimus Directory 03
Page 09
It is a point of cunning, to let fall those words in a man's own name, which he would have another man learn, and use, and thereupon take advantage. I knew two, that were competitors for the secretary's place in Queen Elizabeth's time, and yet kept good quarter between themselves; and would confer, one with another, upon the business; and the one of them said, That to be a secretary, in the declination of a monarchy, was a ticklish thing, and that he did not affect it: the other straight caught up those words, and discoursed with divers of his friends, that he had no reason to desire to be secretary, in the declination of a monarchy. The first man took hold of it, and found means it was told the Queen; who, hearing of a declination of a monarchy, took it so ill, as she would never after hear of the other's suit.
While the Roman legions in the East were acquiring wealth and winning easy conquests, their less fortunate comrades in the West were carrying on a severe struggle with the warlike Gauls, Ligurians, and Spaniards. The Romans had hardly concluded the Second Punic War when they received intelligence that Hamilcar, a Carthaginian officer, had excited several tribes in Northern Italy to take up arms against Rome. These were the Gauls on both sides of the Po, and the Ligurians, a race of hardy mountaineers, inhabiting the upper Apennines and the Maritime Alps. They commenced the war in B.C. 200 by the capture and destruction of the Roman colony of Placentia, and by laying siege to that of Cremona, the two strong-holds of the Roman dominion in Northern Italy. The Romans now set themselves to work, with the characteristic stubbornness of their nation, to subdue thoroughly these tribes. The Insubres and the Cenomani, to the north of the Po, were the first to yield; but the Boii resisted for some years all the efforts of the Romans, and it was not till B.C. 191 that the Consul P. Cornelius Scipio Nasica received their final submission.
|
