Gower journeyed to London without the letter, intoxicated, and conscious of poison; enamoured of it, and straining for health.

He had to reflect at the journey's end, that he had picked up nothing on the road, neither a thing observed nor a thing imagined; he was a troubled pool instead of a flowing river.
The best help to health for him was a day in his father's house.

We are perpetually at our comparisons of ourselves with others; and they are mostly profitless; but the man carrying his religious light, to light the darkest ways of his fellows, and keeping good cheer, as though the heart of him ran a mountain water through the grimy region, plucked at Gower with an envy to resemble him in practice.

His philosophy, too, reproached him for being outshone.

Apart from his philosophy, he stood confessed a bankrupt; and it had dwindled to near extinction.