his debauches. I know some, who for want of this faculty, have found a
great inconvenience in negotiating with that nation. I have often with
great admiration reflected upon the wonderful constitution of
Alcibiades, who so easily could transform himself to so various
fashions without any prejudice to his health; one while outdoing the
Persian pomp and luxury, and another, the Lacedaemonian austerity
and frugality; as reformed in Sparta, as voluptuous in Ionia.

        "Omnis Aristippum decuit color, et status, et res."

I would have my pupil to be such a one,

                   "Quem duplici panno patientia velat,

         Mirabor, vitae via si conversa decebit,

           Personamque feret non inconcinnus utramque."

    These are my lessons, and he who puts them in practice shall
reap more advantage than he who has had them read to him only, and
so only knows them. If you see him, you hear him; if you hear him, you
see him. God forbid, says one in Plato, that to philosophize were only
to read a great many books, and to learn the arts. "Hanc amplissimam
omnium artium bene vivendi disciplinam, vita magis quam literis,
persequuti sunt." Leo, prince of the Phliasians, asking Heraclides
Ponticus of what art or science he made profession; "I know," said he,
"neither art nor science, but I am a philosopher." One reproaching
Diogenes, that, being ignorant, he should pretend to philosophy: "I
therefore," answered he, "pretend to it with so much the more reason."
Hegesias entreated that he would read a certain book to him: "You
are pleasant," said he; "you choose those figs that are true and
natural, and not those that are painted; why do you not also choose
exercises which are naturally true, rather than those written?"

    The lad will not so much get his lesson by heart as he will
practice it: he will repeat it in his actions. We shall discover if
there be prudence in his exercises, if there be sincerity and
justice in his deportment, if there be grace and judgment in his
speaking; if there be constancy in his sickness; if there be modesty
in his mirth, temperance in his pleasures, order in his domestic
economy, indifference in his palate, whether what he eats or drinks be
flesh or fish, wine or water. "Qui disciplinam suam non
ostentationem scientiae, sed legem vitae putet: quique obtemperet ipse
sibi, et decretis pareat." The conduct of our lives is the true mirror
of our doctrine. Zeuxidamus, to one who asked him, why the
Lacedaemonians did not commit their constitutions of chivalry to
writing, and deliver them to their young men to read, made answer,
that it was because they would inure them to action, and not amuse
them with words. With such a one, after fifteen or sixteen years'
study, compare one of our college Latinists, who has thrown away so
much time in nothing but learning to speak. The world is nothing but
babble; and I hardly ever yet saw that man who did not rather prate
too much, than speak too little. And yet half of our age is
embezzled this way: we are kept four or five years to learn words
only, and to tack them together into clauses; as many more to form
them into a long discourse, divided into four or five parts; and other
five years, at least, to learn succinctly to mix and interweave them
after a subtle and intricate manner: let us leave all this to those
who make a profession of it.

    Going one day to Orleans, I met in the plain on this side Clery,
two pedants traveling toward Bordeaux, about fifty paces distant
from one another; and a good way further behind them, I discovered a
troop of horse, with a gentleman at the head of them, who was the late
Monsieur le Comte de la Rochefoucauld. One of my people inquired of
the foremost of these dominies, who that gentleman was that came after
him; he, having not seen the train that followed after, and thinking
his companion was meant, pleasantly answered: "He is not a
gentleman, he is a grammarian, and I am a logician." Now we who, quite
contrary, do not here pretend to breed a grammarian or a logician, but
a gentleman, let us leave them to throw away their time at their own
fancy: our business lies elsewhere. Let but our pupil be well
furnished with things, words will follow but too fast; he will pull
them after him if they do not voluntarily follow. I have observed some
to make excuses, that they cannot express themselves, and pretend to
have their fancies full of a great many very fine things, which yet,
for want of eloquence, they cannot utter; 'tis a mere shift, and
nothing else. Will you know what I think of it? I think they are
nothing but shadows of some imperfect images and conceptions that they
know not what to make of within, nor consequently bring out: they do
not yet themselves understand what they would be at, and if you but
observe how they haggle and stammer upon the point of parturition, you
will soon conclude, that their labor is not to delivery, but about
conception, and that they are but licking their formless embryo. For
my part, I hold, and Socrates commands it, that whoever has in his
mind a sprightly and clear imagination, he will express it well enough
in one kind of tongue or another, and, if he be dumb, by signs

          "Verbaque praevisam rem non invita sequentur."

And as another as poetically says in his prose, "Quum res animum
occupavere, verba ambiunt:" and this other, "Ipsoe res verbe rapiunt."
He knows nothing of ablative, conjunctive, substantive, or grammar, no
more than his lackey, or a fishwife of the Petit Pont; and yet these
will give you a bellyful of talk, if you will hear them, and
peradventure shall trip as little in their language as the best
masters of art in France. He knows no rhetoric, nor how in a preface
to bribe the benevolence of the courteous reader; neither does he care
to know it. Indeed all this fine decoration of painting is easily
effaced by the luster of a simple and blunt truth: these fine