Note 375 — QUARRELS OF AUTHORS; (continued 4)

“Athen. Oxon.,” vol. ii. p. 665, ed. 1721. No one, however, knew better than Hobbes the vanity and uselessness of words: in one place he compares them to “a spider’s web; for, by contexture of words, tender and delicate wits are insnared and stopped, but strong wits break easily through them.” The pointed sentence with which Warburton closes his preface to Shakspeare, is Hobbes’s—that “words are the counters of the wise, and the money of fools.”