een born needing petticoats and breeches nature would have armed
that which she has left to the battery of the seasons with some thicker
skin or hide, as she has our finger ends and the soles of our feet.

"How many men in Turkey go naked for devotion's sake?" a certain man
demanded of one of our loitering rogues whom in the depth of winter he
saw wandering up and down with nothing but his shirt about him, yet as
blithe and lusty as another that keeps himself muffled up to the ears in
furs. "And have not you, good sir," answered he, "your fate all bare?
Imagine I am all face."

The Italians say that when the Duke of Florence asked his fool how,
being so ill-clad, he could endure the cold, he replied, "Master, use
but my receipt, and put all the clothes you have on you, as I do all
mine, and you shall feel no more cold than I do."

King Massinissa, were it never so sharp weather, always went bareheaded.
So did the Emperor Severus. In the battle of the Egyptians and Persians,
Herodotus noticed that of those slain the Egyptians had skulls much
harder than the Persians, by reason that these go ever with their heads
covered with coifs and turbans, while those are from infancy shaven and
bareheaded. King Agesilaus wore his clothes alike winter and summer.
Suetonius says Caesar always marched at the head of his troops, and most
commonly bareheaded and on foot, whether the sun shone or whether it
rained. The like is reported of Hannibal.

Plato, for the better health and comfort of the body, earnestly
persuades that no man should ever give feet or head other cover than
nature had allotted them.

We Frenchmen are accustomed to array ourselves strangely in
parti-coloured suits (not I, for I seldom wear any but black and white,
like my father) to protect ourselves against the cold, but what should
we do in cold like that Captain Martyn du Bellay describes--frosts so
hard that the wine had to be chopped up with axes and shared to the
soldiers by weight?

_V.--Of Solitariness_

Let us leave apart the outworn comparison between a solitary and an
active life, and ask those who engage themselves "for the public good"
whether what they seek in these public charges is not, after all,
private commodity? Public or private, as I suppose, the end is the
same, to live better at ease. But a man does not always seek the best
way to come at it, and often supposes himself to have quit cares when he
has but changed them.

There is not