to bring Lethe-water from below, enough to drug your former hearers; else
you will remind us of the Corinthian tale, and your writing, like
Bellerophon's, be your own condemnation. I assure you I see no decent
defence you can make, at least if your detractors have the humour to
commend the independence of the writings while the writer is a slave and
a voluntary beast of burden before their eyes.

They will say with some plausibility: Either the book is some other
good man's work, and you a jackdaw strutting in borrowed, plumes; or, if
it is really yours, you are a second Salaethus; the Crotoniate legislator
made most severe laws against adultery, was much looked up to on the
strength of it, and was shortly after taken in adultery with his
brother's wife. You are an exact reproduction of Salaethus, they will
say; or rather he was not half so bad as you, seeing that he was mastered
by passion, as he pleaded in court, and moreover preferred to leap
into the flames, like a brave man, when the Crotoniates were moved to
compassion and gave him the alternative of exile. The difference between
_your_ precept and practice is infinitely more ridiculous; you draw
a realistic word-picture of that servile life; you pour contempt on the
man who runs into the trap of a rich man's house, where a thousand
degradations, half of them self-inflicted, await him; and then in extreme
old age, when you are on the border between life and death, you take this
miserable servitude upon you and make a sort of circus exhibition of your
chains. The conspicuousness of your position will only make the more
ridiculous that contrast between your book and your life.

But I need not beat my brains for phrases of reprobation; there is one
good enough in a noble tragedy:

Wisdom begins at home; no wisdom, else.