of his humours, or
whether domestic examples and the good education of my infancy have
insensibly assisted in the work, or, if I was otherwise born so:

"Seu Libra, seu me Scorpius adspicit
Formidolosus, pars violentior
Natalis hors, seu tyrannus
Hesperive Capricornus undae:"

["Whether the Balance or dread Scorpio, more potent over my natal
hour, aspects me, or Capricorn, supreme over the Hesperian sea."
--Horace, Od., ii. 117.]

but so it is, that I have naturally a horror for most vices. The answer
of Antisthenes to him who asked him, which was the best apprenticeship
"to unlearn evil," seems to point at this. I have them in horror, I say,
with a detestation so natural, and so much my own, that the same instinct
and impression I brought of them with me from my nurse, I yet retain, and
no temptation whatever has had the power to make me alter it. Not so
much as my own discourses, which in some things lashing out of the common
road might seem easily to license me to actions that my natural
inclination makes me hate. I will say a prodigious thing, but I will say
it, however: I find myself in many things more under reputation by my
manners than by my opinion, and my concupiscence less debauched than my
reason. Aristippus instituted opinions so bold in favour of pleasure and
riches as set all the philosophers against him: but as to his manners,
Dionysius the tyrant, having presented three beautiful women before him,
to take his choice; he made answer, that he would choose them all, and
that Paris got himself into trouble for having preferred one before the
other two: but, having taken them home to his house, he sent them back
untouched. His servant finding himself overladen upon the way, with the
money he carried after him, he ordered him to pour out and throw away
that which troubled him. And Epicurus, whose doctrines were so
irreligious and effeminate, was in his life very laborious and devout;
he wrote to a friend of his that he lived only upon biscuit and water,
entreating him to send him a little cheese, to lie by him against he had
a mind to make a feast. Must it be true, that to be a perfect good man,
we must be so by an occult, natural, and universal propriety, without
law, reason, or example? The debauches wherein I have been engaged, have
not been, I thank God, of the worst sort, and I have condemned them i