Bashfulness is of no use to a man in want. The adage teaches that persons liberally educated but in mean circumstances, should not refuse to undertake offices, though beneath them, which might be executed without offending against any moral or religious duty. This many do, not from their objection to the labour, but from being ashamed to appear to their friends, or to the world in a degraded situation; they can contemn pleasure, and bear pain or grief with firmness, but reproach and obloquy breaks and overwhelms them. It is the disgrace more than the confinement that makes a prison hateful. When Johnson found a pair of shoes placed at his door by one of his fellow students, actuated by false shame or by pride, he threw them, with great indignation, out of the window; though his own were so much worn as not to keep his feet from the stones. But bashfulness or false modesty is more than useless also, when it deters men from laying open their circumstances to their friends, who both might and would, by their advice or otherwise, relieve them, until, by delay, they are become so involved that nothing can prevent their fall: or when it leads them to conceal their bodily complaints, which not unfrequently happens, from the physician or surgeon, until they no longer admit of being cured.
Fuente: Erasmo, 1602.
