every sort of disaster; he looks such an awkward, inexperienced creature,
unable to say anything personal, when he is abused, in answer to his
adversaries (for he knows no evil of any one); and when he hears the
praises of others, he cannot help laughing from the bottom of his soul at
their pretensions; and this also gives him a ridiculous appearance. A king
or tyrant appears to him to be a kind of swine-herd or cow-herd, milking
away at an animal who is much more troublesome and dangerous than cows or
sheep; like the cow-herd, he has no time to be educated, and the pen in
which he keeps his flock in the mountains is surrounded by a wall. When he
hears of large landed properties of ten thousand acres or more, he thinks
of the whole earth; or if he is told of the antiquity of a family, he
remembers that every one has had myriads of progenitors, rich and poor,
Greeks and barbarians, kings and slaves. And he who boasts of his descent
from Amphitryon in the twenty-fifth generation, may, if he pleases, add as
many more, and double that again, and our philosopher only laughs at his
inability to do a larger sum. Such is the man at whom the vulgar scoff; he
seems to them as if he could not mind his feet. 'That is very true,
Socrates.' But when he tries to draw the quick-witted lawyer out of his
pleas and rejoinders to the contemplation of absolute justice or injustice
in their own nature, or from the popular praises of wealthy kings to the
view of happiness and misery in themselves, or to the reasons why a man
should seek after the one and avoid the other, then the situation is
reversed; the little wretch turns giddy, and is ready to fall over the
precipice; his utterance becomes thick, and he makes himself ridiculous,
not to servant-maids, but to every man of liberal education. Such are the
two pictures: the one of the philosopher and gentleman, who may be excused
for not having learned how to make a bed, or cook up flatteries; the other,
a serviceable knave, who hardly knows how to wear his cloak,--still less
can he awaken harmonious thoughts or hymn virtue's praises.