memory of books, will find that there are very few actions and very few persons of our times, who can there pretend any right. How many worthy men have we seen survive their own reputation, who have seen and suffered the honour and glory, most justly acquired in their youth, extinguished in their own presence? And for three years of this fantastic and imaginary life we must go and throw away our true and essential life, and engage ourselves in the risk of perpetual death. The sages propose to themselves a nobler and more just end in so important an enterprise: Recte facti fecisse merces est; officii fructus ipsum officium est.1 "The reward of a thing well done is to have done it; the fruit of a good office is the office itself." It were, perhaps, excusable in a painter or other artisan, or in a rhetorician or grammarian, to endeavour to raise themselves a name by their works; but the actions of virtue are too noble in themselves to seek any other reward than from their own worth, and especially to seek it in the vanity of human judgments. Why the public to be courted. If this false opinion, nevertheless, be of that use to the public as to keep men in their duty; if the approbation ought people are thereby stirred up to virtue; if princes are touched to see the world bless the memory of Trajan and abominate that of Nero; if it moves them to see the name of that great scoundrel, once so terrible and feared, so freely cursed and reviled by every schoolboy that lights upon it; let it, in the name of God, increase, and be as much as possible nursed up, cherished, and countenanced amongst us. And Plato, bending his whole endeavour to make his citizens virtuous, advises them not to despise the good esteem of the people; and says, that it falls out by a certain divine inspiration that even the wicked themselves ofttimes, as well by word as opinion, can rightly distinguish the virtuous from the wicked. This person and his tutor are both marvellous bold artificers, everywhere to add divine operations and revelations where human force is 1 Seneca, Epist. 81. 2 Laws, xii. wanting: Ut tragici poetæ confugiunt ad deum, quum explicare argumenti exitum non possunt:1 "As the tragic poets have recourse to a god, when they cannot compass the catastrophe of their piece;" and, perhaps, for this reason it was, that Timon, railing at him, called him the great forger of miracles. Seeing that men, by their insufficiency, cannot pay themselves well enough with current money, let the counterfeit be superadded. "Tis a way that has been practised by all the legislators; and there is no government that has not had some mixture either of ceremonial vanity or false opinion, that serves for a curb to keep the people in their duty. "Tis for this that most of them have their fabulous originals and beginnings, so enriched with supernatural mysteries; 'tis this that has given credit to bastard religions, and caused them to be countenanced by men of understanding; and for this that Numa and Sertorius, to possess their men with a better opinion of them, fed them with this foppery; one that the nymph Egeria, the other that his white hind, brought them all their counsels from the gods; and the authority that Numa gave to his laws, under the title of the patronage of this goddess, Zoroaster, legislator of the Bactrians and Persians, gave to his under the name of the god Oromazis ; Trismegistus, legislator of the Egyptians, under that of Mercury; Xamolxis, legislator of the Scythians, under that of Vesta; Charondas, legislator of the Chalcedonians, under that of Saturn; Minos, legislator of the Cretans, under that of Jupiter; Lycurgus, legislator of the Lacedemonians, under that of Apollo; and Draco and Solon, legislators of the Athenians, under that of Minerva; and every government has a god at the head of it; others falsely, that truly which Moses set over the Jews at their departure out of Egypt. The religion of the Bedouins, as the Sire de Joinville reports,3 amongst other things, enjoined a belief that the soul of him amongst them who died for his prince went into another 1 Cicero, de Nat. Deor. i. 20. 2 Laertius, Life of Plato, iii. 26. 8 In his Memoirs, c. 58. more happy body, more beautiful than the former; by which means they much more willingly ventured their lives; In ferrum mens prona viris, animæque capaces "Men covet wounds, and strive death to embrace, This is a very salutary, though an erroneous, belief. Every nation has many such examples of its own; but this subject would require a treatise by itself. The difference be the ladies term duty. To add one word more to my former discourse, I would advise the ladies no more to call that honour twixt that which which is but their duty: Ut enim consuetudo honour and their loquitur, id solum dicitur honestum quod est populari fama gloriosum; 2 "According to the vulgar notion, which only approves that for laudable that is glorious by the public voice;" their duty is the mark, their honour but the outward rind; neither would I advise them to give that excuse in payment for their denials; for I presuppose that their intentions, their desire and will, which are things wherein their honour is not at all concerned, forasmuch as nothing appears without, are much better regulated than the effects: Quæ, quia non liceat, non facit, illa facit: 8 "She who not sins, whom mere restraint keeps in, the offence both towards God and in the conscience is as great to desire as to do; and besides, they are actions so private and secret of themselves as would be easily enough kept from the knowledge of others, wherein the honour consists, if they had not another respect to their duty, and the affection they bear to chastity for itself. Every woman of honour will much rather choose to lose her honour than to hurt her conscience. 1 Lucan, i. 461. 2 Cicero, de Finib. ii. 15. 3 Ovid, Amor. iii. 4, 4. CHAPTER XVII. OF PRESUMPTION. THERE is another sort of glory, which is the having too good an opinion of our own worth. "Tis an inconsiderate affection with which we flatter ourselves, and that represents us to ourselves different from what we truly are; like the passion of love, that lends beauties and graces to the person beloved, and that makes those who are caught with it, with a depraved and corrupt judgment, consider the thing they love more perfect than it is. The fear of being the guilty of presumption ought not to up- give us too mean an opinion of hinder us from known. I would not, nevertheless, for fear of failing on the other side, that a man should not know himself aright, or think himself less than he is; judgment ought in all things to keep itself right and just; 'tis all the reason in the world ourselves, nor to he should discern in himself, as well as in making ourselves others, what truth sets before him; if he be Cæsar, let him boldly think himself the greatest captain in the world. We are nothing but ceremony; ceremony carries us away, and we leave the substance of things; we hold by the branches, and quit the trunk and the body; we have taught the ladies to blush when they hear that but named which they are not at all afraid to do; we dare not call our members by their right names, yet are not afraid to employ them in all sorts of debauches; ceremony forbids us to express by words things that are lawful and natural, and we obey it; reason forbids us to do things unlawful and ill, and nobody obeys it. I find myself here fettered by the laws of neither permits a man to speak well of himself nor ill. We will leave her there for this time. ceremony; for it They whom fortune (call it good or ill) has made to pass their lives in some eminent degree, may, by their public actions, manifest what they are; but they whom she has only employed in the crowd, and of whom nobody will say a word, unless they speak themselves, are to be excused if they take the boldness to speak of themselves to such whose interest it is to know them; by the example of Lucilius,— Ille velut fidis arcana sodalibus olim Credebat libris, neque si male cesserat, usquam Vita senis; 1 "His way was in his books to speak his mind, he always committed to paper his actions and thoughts, and I remember, then, that from my infancy there was observed in me I know not what kind of carriage and behaviour, that seemed to relish of pride and arrogance. I will say this by the way, that it is not inconvenient to have conditions and propensities so proper and so incorporated into us that we have not the means to feel and be aware of them; and of such natural inclinations the body will readily retain some bent, without our knowledge or consent. It was a certain affectation becoming to his beauty that made Alexander carry his head on one side, and Alcibiades to lisp; Julius Cæsar scratched his head with one finger, which is the fashion of a man full of troublesome thoughts; and Cicero, as I take it, was wont to wrinkle up his nose, a sign of a man given to scoffing; such motions as these may imper 8 1 Horace, Sat. ii. 1, 30. 2 Tacitus, Agricola, c. 1. 3 Plutarch, Life of Cæsar, c. 1. The same thing is said of Pompey. Senec. Controv. iii. 19. |