well pleased with my own progress. There is no description so difficult,
nor doubtless of so great utility, as that of a man's self: and withal, a
man must curl his hair and set out and adjust himself, to appear in
public: now I am perpetually tricking myself out, for I am eternally upon
my own description. Custom has made all speaking of a man's self
vicious, and positively interdicts it, in hatred to the boasting that
seems inseparable from the testimony men give of themselves:

"In vitium ducit culpae fuga."

["The avoiding a mere fault often leads us into a greater."
Or: "The escape from a fault leads into a vice"
--Horace, De Arte Poetics, verse 31.]

Instead of blowing the child's nose, this is to take his nose off
altogether. I think the remedy worse than the disease. But, allowing it
to be true that it must of necessity be presumption to entertain people
with discourses of one's self, I ought not, pursuing my general design,
to forbear an action that publishes this infirmity of mine, nor conceal
the fault which I not only practise but profess. Notwithstanding, to
speak my thought freely, I think that the custom of condemning wine,
because some people will be drunk, is itself to be condemned; a man
cannot abuse anything but what is good in itself; and I believe that this
rule has only regard to the popular vice. They are bits for calves, with
which neither the saints whom we hear speak so highly of themselves, nor
the philosophers, nor the divines will be curbed; neither will I, who am
as little the one as the other, If they do not write of it expressly, at
all events, when the occasions arise, they don't hesitate to put
themselves on the public highway. Of what does Socrates treat more
largely than of himself? To what does he more direct and address the