children for a thing of so difficult access, and with such a frowning,
grim, and formidable aspect. Who is it that has disguised it thus,
with this false, pale, and ghostly countenance? There is nothing
more airy, more gay, more frolic, and I had like to have said, more
wanton. She preaches nothing but feasting and jollity; a melancholic
anxious look shows that she does not inhabit there. Demetrius the
grammarian finding in the temple of Delphos a knot of philosophers set
chatting together, said to them, "Either I am much deceived, or by
your cheerful and pleasant countenances, you are engaged in no very
deep discourse." To which one of them, Heracleon the Megarean,
replied: "'Tis for such as are puzzled about inquiring whether the
future tense of the verb Ballo be spelt with a double l or that hunt
after the derivation of the comparatives cheiron and beltion, and
the superlatives cheiriston and beltiston, to knit their brows while
discoursing of their science, but as to philosophical discourses, they
always divert and cheer up those that entertain them, and never deject
them or make them sad."

          "Deprendas animi tormenta latentis in aegro

           Corpore; deprendas et gaudia; sumit utrumque

           Inde habitum facies."

    The soul that lodges philosophy, ought to be of such a
constitution of health, as to render the body in like manner healthful
too; she ought to make her tranquillity and satisfaction shine so as
to appear without, and her contentment ought to fashion the outward
behavior to her own mold, and consequently to fortify it with a
graceful confidence, an active and joyous carriage, and a serene and
contented countenance. The most manifest sign of wisdom is a continual
cheerfulness; her state is like that of things in the regions above
the moon, always clear and serene. 'Tis Baroco and Baralipton that
render their disciples so dirty and ill-favored, and not she; they
do not so much as know her but by hearsay. What! It is she that
calms and appeases the storms and tempests of the soul, and who
teaches famine and fevers to laugh and sing; and that, not by
certain imaginary epicycles, but by natural and manifest reasons.
She has virtue for her end; which is not, as the schoolmen say,
situate upon the summit of a perpendicular, rugged, inaccessible
precipice: such as have approached her find her, quite on the
contrary, to be seated in a fair, fruitful, and flourishing plain,
from whence she easily discovers all things below; to which place
any one may, however, arrive, if he know but the way, through shady,
green, and sweetly flourishing avenues, by a pleasant, easy, and
smooth descent, like that of the celestial vault. 'Tis for not
having frequented this supreme, this beautiful, triumphant, and
amiable, this equally delicious and courageous virtue, this so
professed and implacable enemy to anxiety, sorrow, fear, and
constraint, who, having nature for her guide, has fortune and pleasure
for her companions, that they have gone, according to their own weak
imaginations and created this ridiculous, this sorrowful, querulous,
despiteful, threatening, terrible image of it to themselves and
others, and placed it upon a rock apart, among thorns and brambles,
and made of it a hobgoblin to affright people.

    But the governor that I would have, that is such a one as knows it
to be his duty to possess his pupil with as much or more affection
than reverence to virtue, will be able to inform him, that the poets
have evermore accommodated themselves to the public humor, and make
him sensible, that the gods have planted more toil and sweat in the
avenues of the cabinets of Venus than in those of Minerva. And when he
shall once find him begin to apprehend, and shall represent to him a
Bradamante or an Angelica for a mistress, a natural, active, generous,
and not a viragoish, but a manly beauty, in comparison of a soft,
delicate, artificial, simpering, and affected form; the one in the
habit of a heroic youth, wearing a glittering helmet, the other
tricked up in curls and ribbons like a wanton minx; he will then
look upon his own affection as brave and masculine, when he shall
choose quite contrary to that effeminate shepherd of Phrygia.

    Such a tutor will make a pupil digest this new lesson, that the
height and value of true virtue consists in the facility, utility, and
pleasure of its exercise; so far from difficulty, that boys, as well
as men, and the innocent as well as the subtle, may make it their own:
it is by order, and not by force, that it is to be acquired. Socrates,
her first minion, is so averse to all manner of violence, as totally
to throw it aside, to slip into the more natural facility of her own
progress: 'tis the nursing mother of all human pleasures, who in
rendering them just, renders them also pure and permanent; in
moderating them, keeps them in breath and appetite; in interdicting
those which she herself refuses, whets our desire to those that she
allows; and, like a kind and liberal mother, abundantly allows all
that nature requires, even to satiety, if not to lassitude: unless
we mean to say, that the regimen which stops the toper before he has
drunk himself drunk, the glutton before he has eaten to a surfeit, and
the lecher before he has got the pox, is an enemy to pleasure. If
the ordinary fortune fail, she does without it, and forms another,
wholly her own, not so fickle and unsteady as the other. She can be
rich, be potent and wise, and knows how to lie upon soft perfumed
beds: she loves life, beauty, glory, and health; but her proper and
peculiar office is to know how to regulate the use of all these good
things, and how to lose them without concern: an office much more
noble than troublesome, and without which the whole course of life
is unnatural, turbulent, and deformed, and there it is indeed, that
men may justly represent those monsters upon rocks and precipices.

    If this pupil shall happen to be of so contrary a disposition,
that he had rather hear a tale of a tub than the true narrative of
some noble expedition or some wise and learned discourse; who at the