ve but just now illicitly embraced will presently, even in your
hearing, more loudly inveigh against the same fault in her companion than
a Portia would do;--[The chaste daughter of Cato of Utica.]--and men
there are who will condemn others to death for crimes that they
themselves do not repute so much as faults. I have, in my youth, seen a
man of good rank with one hand present to the people verses that excelled
both in wit and debauchery, and with the other, at the same time, the
most ripe and pugnacious theological reformation that the world has been
treated withal these many years. And so men proceed; we let the laws and
precepts follow their way; ourselves keep another course, not only from
debauchery of manners, but ofttimes by judgment and contrary opinion. Do
but hear a philosophical lecture; the invention, eloquence, pertinency
immediately strike upon your mind and move you; there is nothing that
touches or stings your conscience; 'tis not to this they address
themselves. Is not this true? It made Aristo say, that neither a bath
nor a lecture did aught unless it scoured and made men clean. One may
stop at the skin; but it is after the marrow is picked out as, after we
have swallowed good wine out of a fine cup, we examine the designs and
workmanship. In all the courts of ancient philosophy, this is to be
found, that the same teacher publishes rules of temperance and at the
same time lessons in love and wantonness; Xenophon, in the very bosom of
Clinias, wrote against the Aristippic virtue. 'Tis not that there is any
miraculous conversion in it that makes them thus wavering; 'tis that
Solon represents himself, sometimes in his own person, and sometimes in
that of a legislator; one while he speaks for the crowd, and another for
himself; taking the free and natural rules for his own share, feeling
assured of a firm and entire health:

"Curentur dubii medicis majoribus aegri."

["Desperate maladies require the best doctors."
--Juvenal, xiii. 124.]

Antisthenes allows a sage to love, and to do whatever he thinks
convenient, without regard to the laws, forasmuch as he is better advised
than they, and has a greater knowledge of virtue. His disciple Diogenes
said, that "men to perturbations were to oppose reason: to fortune,
courage: to the laws, nature." For tender stomachs, constrained and
artificial recipes must be prescribed: good and strong stomachs serve
themselves simply