Yes, inquisitiveness is as incontinent as adultery, and not only incontinent, but terribly silly and foolish. To pass by so many women who are public property, and to struggle to get at one [Sidenote: F] who is kept under lock and key, who is expensive, and perhaps ugly to boot, is the very height of insanity. The busybody is just as bad. He passes by much that is admirable to see and hear, many an excellent discourse or discussion, to dig into another man’s poor little letter or clap his ear to his neighbour’s wall, listening to slaves and womenfolk whispering together, and incurring danger often, and discredit always. [Sidenote: 520] Well, if he wishes to get rid of his vice, the busybody will find nothing so helpful as to think over the discoveries he has hitherto made. Simonides used to say that, in opening his boxes after a lapse of time, he found the fee-box always full and the thanks-box always empty. So, if one were to open the store-room of inquisitiveness after an interval, and to contemplate all the useless, futile, and uninviting things with which it is filled, he would probably become sick of the business, so nauseating and senseless would it appear. Suppose a person to run over the works of our old writers and pick out their faultiest passages, compiling and keeping a book full of such things as ‘headless’ lines of Homer, solecisms [Sidenote: B] in the tragedians, the indecent and licentious language to women by which Archilochus makes a sorry show of himself. Does he not deserve the execration in the tragedy: _Perish, thou picker-up of miseries!_ Execration apart, his treasury, filled with other men’s faults, possesses neither beauty nor use. It is like the town which Philip founded with the rudest riff-raff, and which he called Knaveborough. With the busybody, however, it is not from lines of poetry, but from lives, that he goes gleaning and gathering blunders and slips and solecisms, till the memory which he carries about is the dullest and dreariest record-box, crammed with ugly things. [Sidenote: C] At Rome there are those who set no store by the paintings, the statues, or—failing these—the handsome children or women on sale, but who haunt the monster-market, examining specimens with no calves to their legs, or with weasel-elbows, three eyes, or ostrich-heads, and looking out for the appearance of any _Commingled shape and misformed prodigy._ Yet if you keep on showing them such sights, they will soon become surfeited and sick of it all. In the same way those who make it their business to pry into other people’s failures in their affairs, blots on their pedigree, disturbances and delinquencies in their homes, will do well to remind themselves how thankless [Sidenote: D] and unprofitable their previous discoveries have proved.