… if all the world

Should in a pet of temperance feed on pulse,

Drink the clear stream and nothing wear but freize,

The all-giver would be unthanked, would be unpraised,

Not half his riches known, and yet despised;

And we should serve him as a grudging master,

As a penurious niggard of his wealth

And live like nature’s bastards, not her sons,

who would be quite surcharged with her own weight,

And strangled with her waste fertility….

John Milton (1608-74), Comus.