worse.

standing should so immoderately affect brevity; no doubt their reputation is the better by it, but in the meantime we are the Plutarch had rather we should applaud his judgment than commend his knowledge, and had rather leave us with an appetite to read more, than glutted with that we have already read. He knew very well that a man may say too much even upon the best subjects, and that Alexandridas justly reproached him who made very good but too long speeches to the Ephori, when he said: "O stranger! thou speakest the things thou shouldst speak, but not as thou shouldst speak them." Such as have lean and spare bodies stuff themselves out with clothes; so they who are defective in matter endeavor to make amends with words.

Human understanding is marvelously enlightened by daily conversation with men, for we are, otherwise, compressed and heaped up in ourselves, and have our sight limited to the length of our own noses. One asking Socrates of what country he was, he did not make answer, of Athens, but of the world; he whose imagination was fuller and wider embraced the whole world for his country, and extended his society and friendship to all mankind; not as we do, who look no farther than our feet. When the vines of my village are nipped with the frost, my parish priest presently concludes that the indignation of God is gone out against all the human race, and that the cannibals have already got the pip. Who is it that seeing the havoc of these civil wars of ours does not cry out that the machine of the world is near dissolution and that the day of judgment is at hand; without considering that many worse things have been seen, and that in the meantime people are very merry in a thousand other parts of the earth for all this? For my part, considering the license and impunity that always attend such commotions, I wonder they are so moderate and that there is no more mischief done. To him who feels the hailstones patter about his ears, the whole hemi

sphere appears to be in storm and tempest; like the ridiculous Savoyard, who said very gravely, that if that simple king of France could have managed his fortune as he should have done, he might in time have come to be steward of the household to the duke his master: the fellow could not, in his shallow imagination, conceive that there could be anything greater than a Duke of Savoy. And, in truth, we are all of us, insensibly, in this error, an error of a very great weight and very pernicious consequence. But whoever shall represent to his fancy, as in a picture, that great image of our mother nature, in her full majesty and luster, whoever in her face shall read. so general and so constant a variety, whoever shall observe himself in that figure, and not himself but a whole kingdom, no bigger than the least touch or prick of a pencil in comparison of the whole, that man alone is able to value things according to their true estimate and grandeur.

This great world which some do yet multiply as several species under one genus, is the mirror wherein we are to behold ourselves, to be able to know ourselves as we ought to do in the true bias. In short, I would have this to be the book my young gentleman should study with the most attention. So many humors, so many sects, so many judgments, opinions, laws, and customs, teach us to judge aright of our own, and inform our understanding to discover its imperfection. and natural infirmity, which is no trivial speculation. So many mutations of states and kingdoms, and so many turns and revolutions of public fortune, will make us wise enough to make no great wonder of our own. So many great names, so many famous victories and conquests drowned and swallowed in oblivion, render our hopes ridiculous of eternizing our names by the taking of half a score of light horse, or a henroost, which only derives its memory from its ruin. The pride and arrogance of so many foreign pomps, the inflated majesty of so many courts and grandeurs, accustom and fortify our

sight without closing our eyes to behold the luster of our own; so many trillions of men, buried before us, encourage us not to fear to go seek such good company in the other world; and so of the rest. Pythagoras was wont to say that our life resembles the great and populous assembly of the Olympic games, wherein some exercise the body, that they may carry away the glory of the prize: others bring merchandise to sell for profit: there are also some (and those none of the worst sort) who pursue no other advantage than only to look on, and consider how and why everything is done, and to be spectators of the lives of other men, thereby the better to judge of and regulate their own.

To examples may fitly be applied all the profitable discourses of philosophy, to which all human actions, as to their best rule, ought to be especially directed: a scholar shall be taught to know:

"What we are, and to what life we are begotten; what it is right to wish; what is the use of new money; how much it becomes us to give to our country and dear kindred; whom the Deity has commanded thee to be; and in what human part thou art placed" (Persius);

what it is to know, and what to be ignorant; what ought to be the end and design of study; what valor, temperance, and justice are; the difference betwixt ambition and avarice, servitude and subjection, license and liberty; by what token a man may know true and solid contentment; how far death, affliction, and disgrace are to be apprehended:—

"And how you may shun or sustain every hardship" (Virgil);

by what secret springs we move, and the reason of our various agitations and irresolutions: for methinks the first doctrine with which one should season his understanding ought to be that

which regulates his manners and his sense; that teaches him to know himself, and how both well to die and well to live. Amongst the liberal sciences [that is, liberal branches of knowledge], let us begin with that which makes us free; not that they do not all serve in some measure to the instruction and use of life, as all other things in some sort also do; but let us make choice of that which directly and professedly serves to that end. If we are once able to restrain the offices of human life within their just and natural limits, we shall find that most of the sciences in use are of no great use to us, and even in those that are, that there are many very unnecessary cavities and dilatations which we had better let alone, and, following Socrates' direction, limit the course of our studies to those things only where is a true and real utility:

"Dare to be wise; begin! he who defers the hour of living well is like the clown, waiting till the river shall have flowed out: but the river still flows, and will flow for ever" (Horace).

"Tis a great foolery to teach our children:—

"What influence Pisces have, or the sign of angry Leo, or Capricorn, washed by the Hesperian wave" (Propertius);

the knowledge of the stars and the motion of the eighth sphere before their own:→→

"What care I about the Pleiades or the stars of Taurus?" (Anacreon).

Anaximenes writing to Pythagoras, "To what purpose," said he, "should I trouble myself in searching out the secrets of the stars, having death or slavery continually before my eyes?" for the kings of Persia were at that time preparing to invade his country. Everyone ought to say thus, "Being assaulted as I am by ambition, avarice, temerity, superstition, and having

within so many other enemies of life, shall I go cudgel my brains about the world's revolutions? " 1

After having taught him what will make him more wise and good, you may then entertain him with the elements of logic, physics, geometry, rhetoric; and the science which he shall then himself most incline to, his judgment being beforehand formed and fit to choose, he will quickly make his own. The way of instructing him ought to be sometimes by discourse, and sometimes by reading; sometimes his governor shall put the author himself, which he shall think most proper for him, into his hands, and sometimes only the marrow and substance of it; and if himself be not conversant enough in books to turn to all the fine discourses the books contain for his purpose, there may some man of learning be joined to him, that upon every occasion shall supply him with what he stands in need of, to furnish it to his pupil. And who can doubt but that this way of teaching is much more easy and natural than that of Gaza,2 in which the precepts are so intricate, and so harsh, and the words so vain, lean, and insignificant, that there is no hold to be taken of them, nothing that quickens and elevates the wit and fancy, whereas here the mind has what to feed upon and to digest. This fruit, therefore, is not only without comparison much more fair and beautiful; but will also be much more early ripe.

'Tis a thousand pities that matters should be at such a pass in this age of ours, that philosophy, even with men of understanding, should be looked upon as a vain and fantastic name, a thing of no use, no value, either in opinion or effect; of which I think those ergotisms and petty sophistries, by prepossessing the avenues to it, are the cause. And people are

1 With the views here expressed regarding the place of astronomical studies may be compared related ideas of Pascal, pp. 322f., below; of Goethe, pp. 362f., below; of Coventry Patmore, in the poem "The Two Deserts," Poetry, p. 735;-also certain implications of the essay immediately following-"A Speech at Eton."

2 Theodore Gaza, rector of the Academy of Ferrara. [Hazlitt.]