4
Envy is not likely to be found among brutes, whose fancies are not moved by the apprehensions of each other’s good or evil; neither can they be spirited with the notions of glorious or dishonorable, by which envy is chiefly stirred up. Yet they have mutual hatred; they kill each other, and wage most incredible wars. The eagles and the dragons fight, the crows and the owls, yea, the little titmouse and linnet; insomuch that it is said, the very blood of these creatures, when slain, will by no means be mixed; but though you would temper them together, they will immediately separate again. The lion also vehemently hates the cock, and the elephant the hog; but this probably proceeds from fear; for what they fear, the same are they inclined to hate.
4
We see then herein a great difference betwixt envy and hate, that the one is natural to brutes, but they are not at all capable of the other.
5
Further, envy is always unjust; for none wrong by being happy, and upon this sole account they are envied. But hatred is often just; for there are some men so much to be avoided and disliked, that we should judge those worthy to be hated themselves who do not shun and detest them. And of this it is no weak evidence, that many will acknowledge they hate, but none will confess they envy; and hatred of the evil is registered amongst laudable things.
5
Therefore, as some were commending Charillus, the nephew of Lycurgus and king of Sparta, for his universally mild and gentle disposition,—How, answered his colleague, can Charillus be a virtuous person, who is pleasing even to the vicious? So the poet too, when he had variously and with an infinite curiosity described the deformities of Thersites’s body, easily couched all the baseness of his manners in a word,— Most hateful to Achilles and Ulysses too; for to be an enemy to the good is the greatest extravagance of vice.
