excellent makeshift for disinterested service to them. With all his
admiration for the antique greatness of character, he would never
commend "so savage a virtue, and one that costs so dear," as that,
for instance, of the Greek mother, the Roman father, who assisted to
put their own erring sons to death. More truly commendable was the
custom of the Lacedaemonians, who when they went to battle sacrificed
always to the Muses, that "these might, by their sweetness and
gaiety, soften martial fury." How had divine philosophy herself been
discredited by the sour mask, the sordid patches, with which, her
enemies surely! had sent her abroad into the world. "I love a gay
and civil philosophy. There is nothing more cheerful than wisdom: I
had like to have said more wanton."

Was that why his conversation was sometimes coarse? "All the
contraries are to be found in [111] me, in one corner or another"; if
delicacy, so also coarseness. Delicacy there was, certainly,--a
wonderful fineness of sensation. "To the end," he tells us, "that
sleep should not so stupidly escape from me, I have caused myself to
be disturbed in my sleep, so that I might the better and more
sensibly taste and relish it.--Of scents, the simple and natural seem
to me the most pleasing, and I have often observed that they cause an
alteration in me, and work upon my spirits according to their several
virtues. In excessive heats I always travel by night, from sunset to
sunrise. I am betimes sensible of the little breezes that begin to
sing and whistle in the shrouds, the forerunners of the storm.--When
I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts are for a while
taken up with foreign occurrences, I some part of the time call them
back again to my walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of the
solitude, and to myself.--There is nothing in us either purely
corporeal, or purely spiritual. 'Tis an inhuman wisdom that would