ill think
better of me for not understanding what I say, and will conclude the
depth of my sense by its obscurity; which, to speak in good sooth, I
mortally hate, and would avoid it if I could. Aristotle boasts somewhere
in his writings that he affected it: a vicious affectation. The frequent
breaks into chapters that I made my method in the beginning of my book,
having since seemed to me to dissolve the attention before it was raised,
as making it disdain to settle itself to so little, I, upon that account,
have made them longer, such as require proposition and assigned leisure.
In such an employment, to whom you will not give an hour you give
nothing; and you do nothing for him for whom you only do it whilst you
are doing something else. To which may be added that I have,
peradventure, some particular obligation to speak only by halves, to
speak confusedly and discordantly. I am therefore angry at this
trouble-feast reason, and its extravagant projects that worry one's life,
and its opinions, so fine and subtle, though they be all true, I think
too dear bought and too inconvenient. On the contrary, I make it my
business to bring vanity itself in repute, and folly too, if it produce
me any pleasure; and let myself follow my own natural inclinations,
without carrying too strict a hand upon them.

I have seen elsewhere houses in ruins, and statues both of gods and men:
these are men still. 'Tis all true; and yet, for all that, I cannot so
often revisit the tomb of that so great and so puissant city,--[Rome]--
that I do not admire and reverence it. The care of the dead is
recommended to us; now, I have been bred up from my infancy with these
dead; I had knowledge of the affairs of Rome long before I had any of
those of my own house; I knew the Capitol and its plan before I knew the
Louvre, and the Tiber before I knew the Seine. The qualities and
fortunes of Lucullus, Metellus, and Scipio have ever run more in my head
than those of any of my own country; they are all dead; so is my father
as absolutely dead as they, and is removed as far from me and life in
eighteen years as they are in sixteen hundred: whose memory,
nevertheless, friendship and society, I do not cease to embrace and
utilise with a perfect and lively union. Nay, of my own inclination, I
pay more service to the dead; they can no longer help themselves, and
therefore, methinks, the more require my assistance: 'tis there that
gratitude appears in its