in itself, and well worthy of admiration, that I find so unpleasant as not to desire to imitate, to the degree it was in him. milianus compared Scipio Emilianus, would any attribute to him as Scipio Ebrave and magnificent an end, and as profound and the only universal a knowledge of the sciences, is the only one to be person fit to be put into the other scale of the ba-with him. lance: oh! what a mortification has time given us, to deprive us of the sight of two of the most noble lives, which, by the common consent of all the world, one of the greatest of the Greeks, and the other of the Romans, were in all Plutarch! What a subject! What a workman! biades For a man that was no saint, but, as we say, a The figure gallant man, of civil and ordinary manners, and of a which Alcimoderate eminence, the richest life that I know, and made. full of the most valuable and desirable qualities, all things considered, is, in my opinion, that of Álcibiades. his &c. of Epa 1 But as to Epaminondas, I will here, as an instance Humanity, of excessive goodness, add some of his opinions. He minondas. declared, "That the greatest satisfaction he ever "had in his whole life, was the pleasure he gave "father and mother by his victory at Leuctra ;"* wherein his complaisance is great, preferring their pleasure before his own, so just, and so full of so glorious an action: he did not think it lawful to kill any man for no crime, even though it were to restore the liberty of his country:† which made him so cool in the enterprise of his companion Pelopidas for the relief of Thebes. He was also of opinion, "That "men in battle ought to avoid attacking a friend "that was on the contrary side, and to spare him."‡ And his humanity, even towards his enemies themselves, having rendered him suspected to the Boo * Plutarch, in the Life of Coriolanus, cap. 2. tise, to prove, that there can be no merry life, curus. + Plutarch, of Socrates's Dæmon, cap. 4. Idem, ibid. cap. 17. And in his treaaccording to Epi tians; for that, after he had miraculously forced the Lacedæmonians to open to him the pass, which they had undertaken to defend at the entrance of the Morea, near Corinth, he contented himself with having charged through them, without pursuing them to the utmost; for this he had his commission of general taken from him, which was very honourable on such an account, and for the shame it was to them, upon necessity, afterwards to restore him to his command, and to own how much their safety and honour depended upon him: victory, like a shadow, attending him wherever he went: and, indeed, the prosperity of his country, as being from him derived, died with him,* CHAPTER XXVIII. Of the Resemblance of Children to their Fathers. IN compounding this farrago of so many different pieces, I never set pen to paper, but when I have too much idle time, and never any where but at home; so that it is the work of several pauses and intervals, as occasions keep me sometimes many months abroad. As to the rest, I never correct my first by any second conceptions; I perhaps may alter a word or so, but it is only to vary the phrase, and not to cancel my meaning: I have a mind to represent the progress of my humours, that every piece, as it comes from the brain, may be seen: I could wish I had begun sooner, and taken notice of the course of my mutations. A servant of mine, that I employed to transcribe for me, thought he had got a prize by stealing several pieces, which best pleased his fancy; but it is my comfort, that he will be no Corn. Nepos, in the Life of Epaminondas greater a gainer, than I shall be a loser by the theft. tience in always I am grown older, by seven or eight years, since MonI began; neither has it been without some new ac- taigne's pa quisition I have, in that time, been acquainted the disease with the cholic, and a long course of years hardly which he wears off without some such inconvenience. I could dreaded, have been glad, that, of other infirmities age has to present long-lived men, it had chosen some one that would have been more welcome to me, for it could not possibly have laid upon me a disease, for which, even from my infancy, I have had a greater horror; and it is, in truth, of all the accidents of old-age, the very distemper of which I have ever been most afraid. I have often thought with myself, that I went on too far, and that, in so long a voyage, I should infallibly, at last, meet with some scurvy shock; I perceived, and oft enough declared, that it was time to knock off; that life was to be cut to the quick, according to the surgeons' rule in the amputation of a limb; and that nature usually made him pay very dear interest, who did not, in due time, restore the principal. Yet I was so far from being then ready, that in eighteen months time, or thereabouts, I have been in this uneasy condition, I have inured myself to it, I have compounded with this cholic, and have found therein to comfort myself, and to hope; so much are men enslaved to their miserable being, that there is no condition so wretched that they will not accept, for preserving it, according to that of Mecenas: Debilem facito manu, Debilem pede, coxâ, Vita dum superest, bene est.* Maim both my hands and feet, break legs and thighs, Let me but live, all's well enough, he cries. Senec. epist. 101. * And Tamerlane, with a foolish humanity, palliated the fantastic cruelty he exercised upon lepers, when he put all he could hear of to death, by pretending to deliver them from a painful life: for there was not one of them who would not rather have undergone a triple leprosy, than be deprived of their being. Antisthenes, the Stoic, being very sick, and crying out, "Who will deliver me from these evils?" Diogenes, who was come to visit him, "This," said he, presenting him a knife, “ presently, if thou "wilt:" "I do not say, from my life," he replied, "but from my disease."+ The sufferings that only attack the mind, I am not so sensible of as most other men, and that partly out of judgment: for the world looks upon several things as dreadful, or to be avoided at the expense of life, that are almost indifferent to me; partly through a stupid and insensible complexion I have in accidents which do not hit me point-blank; and that insensibility I look upon, as one of the best parts of my natural constitution; but essential and corporeal sufferings I am very sensible of. Yet having, long since, foreseen them, though with a sight weak and delicate, and softened with the long and happy health and quiet that God has been pleased to give me the greatest part of my time, I had, in my imagination, fancied them so insupportable, that, in truth, I was more afraid than I have since found I had cause; by which I am still more fortified in this belief, that most of the faculties of the soul, as we employ them, more disturb the repose of life, than any way promote it. The stone- I am in conflict with the worst, the most sudden, cholic the most painthe most painful, the most mortal, and the most ful of all incurable of all diseases: I have already had five or six very long and painful fits, and yet I either flatter diseases. * Or rather, the Cynic, of which sect he was the head, though, in the main, there is no great difference between the two sects, as to their doctrine. 19. † Diog. Laertius, in the Life of Antisthenes, lib. v. sect. 18, myself, or there is even in this state, what is very well to be endured by a man who has his soul free from the fear of death, and from the menaces, conclusions, and consequences, which we are alarmed with by physic. But the effect of the pain itself is not so very acute and intolerable as to drive a solid man into fury and despair. I have, at least, this advantage by my cholic, that what I could not hitherto wholly prevail with myself to resolve upon, as to reconciling and acquainting myself with death, it will perfect; for, the more it presses upon and importunes me, I shall be so much the less afraid to die. I have already gone so far as only to love life for life's sake, but my pain will also dissolve this correspondence; and God grant that, in the end, should the sharpness of it prove greater than I shall be able to bear, it may not throw me into the other not less vicious extreme, to desire and wish to die; Summum nec metuas diem, nec optes.* Neither to wish nor fear to die. may freely They are two passions to be feared, but the one has its remedy much nearer at hand than the other. As to the rest, I have always found the precept, Complaint which so strictly enjoins a constant good counte- be indulged nance, and a serene comportment in the sufferance in the agoof pain, to be merely ceremonial. Why should phi-"y of pain. losophy, which only has respect to life and its effects, trouble itself about these external appearances? Let it leave that care to stage-players, and masters of rhetoric, so much practised in our gestures. Let it, in God's name, allow this vocal frailty, if it be neither cordial nor stomachic, to the disease; and permit the ordinary ways of expressing grief by sighs, sobs, palpitations, and turning pale, that nature has put out of our power to hinder: and provided the courage be undaunted, and the expression not Mart. lib. x. epig. 47, ver. ult. |