with the world is so pestered, will, as I have done, find,
that for the most part, they neither understand others, nor themselves;
and that their memories are full enough, but the judgment totally void
and empty; some excepted, whose own nature has of itself formed them into
better fashion. As I have observed, for example, in Adrian Turnebus, who
having never made other profession than that of mere learning only, and
in that, in my opinion, he was the greatest man that has been these
thousand years, had nothing at all in him of the pedant, but the wearing
of his gown, and a little exterior fashion, that could not be civilised
to courtier ways, which in themselves are nothing. I hate our people,
who can worse endure an ill-contrived robe than an ill-contrived mind,
and take their measure by the leg a man makes, by his behaviour, and so
much as the very fashion of his boots, what kind of man he is. For
within there was not a more polished soul upon earth. I have often
purposely put him upon arguments quite wide of his profession, wherein I
found he had so clear an insight, so quick an apprehension, so solid a
judgment, that a man would have thought he had never practised any other
thing but arms, and been all his life employed in affairs of State.
These are great and vigorous natures,

"Queis arte benigna
Et meliore luto finxit praecordia Titan."

["Whom benign Titan (Prometheus) has framed of better clay."
--Juvenal, xiv. 34.]

that can keep themselves upright in despite of a pedantic education. But
it is not enough that our education does not spoil us; it must, moreover,
alter us for the better.

Some of our Parliaments, when they are to admit officers, examine only
their learning; to which some of the others also add the trial of
understanding, by asking their judgment of some case in law; of these the
latter, methinks, proceed with the better method; for although both are
necessary, and that it is very requisite they should be defective in
neither, yet, in truth, knowledge is not so absolutely necessary as
judgment; the last may make shift without the other, but the other never
without this. For as the Greek verse says--

["To what use serves learning, if understanding be away."
--Apud Stobaeus, tit. iii., p. 37 (1609).]

Would to God that, for the good of our judicature, these societies were
as well furnished with understanding and conscience as they