Paying a high price for some future and incidental advantage. "Parting with the substance for a shadow". The adage advises not to part with what we actually possess, upon the distant prospect of some doubtful or uncertain profit; "e meglio aver hoggi un uovo, che dimana una gallina", better an egg to-day than a hen to-morrow, or "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush". It would be worse than madness in any one in possession of a competence, or exercising successfully any business or profession to hazard all in pursuit of some new scheme, which however promising in appearance, might fail and_involve him in ruin: and yet of this folly there are few but are acquainted with some victims. This, the Spaniards say, is "yr por lana, y bolver tresquilado", going for wool, and returning home shorn. How many young men again, spend whole years of their invaluable time, in cultivating the friendship of some great man in the hope of obtaining preferment, and are only at length weaned from the pursuit, in the course of which they have submitted to all those insults and mortifications incident to a state of dependence, by rinding other, perhaps less obsequious clients, preferred to the office which had been pointed out to them as the reward of their servitude: awaked, at length, from their dream of prosperity, they find the loss of the expected office the smallest part of their misery. They have not only neglected to improve the little fortune they possessed, but have suffered it to slip completely away, or have so reduced it as not to have a sufficiency left for their subsistence; in the meantime they have contracted habits of idleness, which render it impossible for them to search out means of recovering what they have lost: this is buying hope at a dreadfully high price indeed! The adage also alludes to a custom, common, we are told, among the ancients, and which has descended to the present times, of purchasing the produce of an orchard while the trees were only in blossom, or of a field of corn as soon as the seed was committed to the ground, at stipulated prices. This species of gaming was carried so far, that it was not unusual to buy a draught of fishes, or so many as should be taken at one cast of a net; or all the game that should be taken in one day's hunting : and laws, we are told, were framed to regulate this kind of traffic.
"Lord Bacon, being in York-house garden, looking on fishers as they were throwing their net, asked them what they would take for their draught; they answered so much, his lordship would offer them only so much; they drew up their net, and in it were only two or three little fishes; his lordship then told them, it had been better for them to have taken his offer; they replied, they hoped to have had a better draught; but, said his lordship, "hope is a good breakfast, but a bad supper". Aubrey's Manuscripts.