all it receives, one while better, and another worse, according to its
insatiable, vagabond, and versatile essence:

"Sincerum est nisi vas, quodcunque infundis, acescit."

["Unless the vessel be clean, it will sour whatever
you put into it."--Horace, Ep., i. 2, 54.]

I, who boast that I so curiously and particularly embrace the
conveniences of life, find them, when I most nearly consider them, very
little more than wind. But what? We are all wind throughout; and,
moreover, the wind itself, more discreet than we, loves to bluster and
shift from corner to corner, and contents itself with its proper offices
without desiring stability and solidity-qualities not its own.

The pure pleasures, as well as the pure displeasures, of the imagination,
say some, are the greatest, as was expressed by the balance of
Critolaiis. 'Tis no wonder; it makes them to its own liking, and cuts
them out of the whole cloth; of this I every day see notable examples,
and, peradventure, to be desired. But I, who am of a mixed and heavy
condition, cannot snap so soon at this one simple object, but that I
negligently suffer myself to be carried away with the present pleasures
of the, general human law, intellectually sensible, and sensibly
intellectual. The Cyrenaic philosophers will have it that as corporal
pains, so corporal pleasures are more powerful, both as double and as
more just. There are some, as Aristotle says, who out of a savage kind
of stupidity dislike them; and I know others who out of ambition do the
same. Why do they not, moreover, forswear breathing? why do they not
live of their own? why not refuse light, because it is gratuitous, and
costs them neither invention nor exertion? Let Mars, Pallas, or Mercury