A comparison between those who lack wealth and those who lack virtue

11. He whose soul is barren of virtue is like those poor wretches that till a barren inheritance of stony fields, mere heaps of rocks and thorns. Since they may win no harvest from their own wildernesses, and find no fruit in a soil where only

Wild oats and darnel rank have mastery,

conscious of their own poverty they go forth to steal the fruits of others and rifle their gardens, that they may mingle their neighbours' flowers with their own thistles.