and by experience, we have it
however by jargon and heart: we are not content to know the extraction,
kindred, and alliances of our neighbours; we desire, moreover, to have
them our friends and to establish a correspondence and intelligence with
them; but this education of ours has taught us definitions, divisions,
and partitions of virtue, as so many surnames and branches of a
genealogy, without any further care of establishing any familiarity or
intimacy betwixt her and us. It has culled out for our initiatory
instruction not such books as contain the soundest and truest opinions,
but those that speak the best Greek and Latin, and by their fine words
has instilled into our fancy the vainest humours of antiquity.

A good education alters the judgment and manners; as it happened to
Polemon, a lewd and debauched young Greek, who going by chance to hear
one of Xenocrates' lectures, did not only observe the eloquence and
learning of the reader, and not only brought away, the knowledge of some
fine matter, but a more manifest and more solid profit, which was the
sudden change and reformation of his former life. Whoever found such an
effect of our discipline?

"Faciasne, quod olim
Mutatus Polemon? ponas insignia morbi
Fasciolas, cubital, focalia; potus ut ille
Dicitur ex collo furtim carpsisse coronas,
Postquam est impransi correptus voce magistri?"

["Will you do what reformed Polemon did of old? will you lay aside
the joys of your disease, your garters, capuchin, muffler, as he in
his cups is said to have secretly torn off his garlands from his
neck when he heard what that temperate teacher said?"
--Horace, Sat., ii. 3, 253]

That seems to me to be the least contemptible condition of men, which by
its plainness and simplicity is seated in the lowest degree, and invites
us to a more regular course. I find the rude manners and language of
country people commonly better suited to the rule and prescription of
true philosophy, than those of our philosophers themselves:

"Plus sapit vulgus, quia tantum, quantum opus est, sapit."

["The vulgar are so much the wiser, because they only know what
is needful for them to know."--Lactantms, Instit. Div., iii. 5.]

The most remarkable men, as I have judged by outward appearance (for to
judge of them according to my own method, I must penetrate a gr