Thus spoke:—“Whilst others’ ills from others flow,
To my own plumes, alas! my fate I owe.”
Even as a broken mirror, which the glass
In every fragment multiplies, and makes
A thousand images of one that was,
The same, and still the more, the more it breaks.
Byron: Childe Harold.
Suggested by the following passage:—
And as Praxiteles did by his glass when he saw a scurvy face in it, brake it to pieces, but for that one he saw many more as bad in a moment.