own
humour, and peradventure not without some excess, I look upon all men as
my compatriots, and embrace a Polander as a Frenchman, preferring the
universal and common tie to all national ties whatever. I am not much
taken with the sweetness of a native air: acquaintance wholly new and
wholly my own appear to me full as good as the other common and
fortuitous ones with Four neighbours: friendships that are purely of our
own acquiring ordinarily carry it above those to which the communication
of climate or of blood oblige us. Nature has placed us in the world free
and unbound; we imprison ourselves in certain straits, like the kings of
Persia, who obliged themselves to drink no other water but that of the
river Choaspes, foolishly quitted claim to their right in all other
streams, and, so far as concerned themselves, dried up all the other
rivers of the world. What Socrates did towards his end, to look upon a
sentence of banishment as worse than a sentence of death against him, I
shall, I think, never be either so decrepid or so strictly habituated to
my own country to be of that opinion. These celestial lives have images
enough that I embrace more by esteem than affection; and they have some
also so elevated and extraordinary that I cannot embrace them so much as
by esteem, forasmuch as I cannot conceive them. That fancy was singular
in a man who thought the whole world his city; it is true that he
disdained travel, and had hardly ever set his foot out of the Attic
territories. What say you to his complaint of the money his friends
offered to save his life, and that he refused to come out of prison by
the mediation of others, in order not to disobey the laws in a time when
they were otherwise so corrupt? These examples are of the first kind for
me; of the second, there are others that I could find out in the same
person: many of these rare examples surpass the force of my action, but
some of them, moreover, surpass the force of my judgment.

Besides these reasons, travel is in my opinion a very profitable
exercise; the soul is there continually employed in observing new and
unknown things, and I do not know, as I have often said a better school
wherein to model life than by incessantly exposing to it the diversity
of so many other lives, fancies, and usances, and by making it relish a
perpetual variety of forms of human nature. The body is, therein,
neither idle nor overwrought; and that moderate agitation puts