f the generous
murderers of Caesar. Plutarch is frank throughout: Seneca abounds with
brisk touches and sallies; Plutarch with things that warm and move you
more; this contents and pays you better: he guides us, the other pushes
us on.

As to Cicero, his works that are most useful to my design are they that
treat of manners and rules of our life. But boldly to confess the truth
(for since one has passed the barriers of impudence, there is no bridle),
his way of writing appears to me negligent and uninviting: for his
prefaces, definitions, divisions, and etymologies take up the greatest
part of his work: whatever there is of life and marrow is smothered and
lost in the long preparation. When I have spent an hour in reading him,
which is a great deal for me, and try to recollect what I have thence
extracted of juice and substance, for the most part I find nothing but
wind; for he is not yet come to the arguments that serve to his purpose,
and to the reasons that properly help to form the knot I seek. For me,
who only desire to become more wise, not more learned or eloquent, these
logical and Aristotelian dispositions of parts are of no use. I would
have a man begin with the main proposition. I know well enough what
death and pleasure are; let no man give himself the trouble to anatomise
them to me. I look for good and solid reasons, at the first dash, to
instruct me how to stand their shock, for which purpose neither
grammatical subtleties nor the quaint contexture of words and
argumentations are of any use at all. I am for discourses that give the
first charge into the heart of the redoubt; his languish about the
subject; they are proper for the schools, for the bar, and for the
pulpit, where we have leisure to nod, and may awake, a quarter of an hour
after, time enough to find again the thread of the discourse. It is
necessary to speak after this manner to judges, whom a man has a design
to gain over, right or wrong, to children and common people, to whom a
man must say all, and see what will come of it. I would not have an
author make it his business to render me attentive: or that he should cry
out fifty times Oyez! as the heralds do. The Romans, in their religious
exercises, began with 'Hoc age' as we in ours do with 'Sursum corda';
these are so many words lost to me: I come already fully prepared from my
chamber. I need no allurement, no invitation, no sauce; I eat the meat
raw, so that, instead of whet