might serve to protect him, and to recommend him to the
divine favour, that they might get safe to shore. 'Tis not that a wise
man may not live everywhere content, and be alone in the very crowd of a
palace; but if it be left to his own choice, the schoolman will tell you
that he should fly the very sight of the crowd: he will endure it if need
be; but if it be referred to him, he will choose to be alone. He cannot
think himself sufficiently rid of vice, if he must yet contend with it in
other men. Charondas punished those as evil men who were convicted of
keeping ill company. There is nothing so unsociable and sociable as man,
the one by his vice, the other by his nature. And Antisthenes, in my
opinion, did not give him a satisfactory answer, who reproached him with
frequenting ill company, by saying that the physicians lived well enough
amongst the sick, for if they contribute to the health of the sick, no
doubt but by the contagion, continual sight of, and familiarity with
diseases, they must of necessity impair their own.

Now the end, I take it, is all one, to live at more leisure and at one's
ease: but men do not always take the right way. They often think they
have totally taken leave of all business, when they have only exchanged
one employment for another: there is little less trouble in governing a
private family than a whole kingdom. Wherever the mind is perplexed, it
is in an entire disorder, and domestic employments are not less
troublesome for being less important. Moreover, for having shaken off
the court and the exchange, we have not taken leave of the principal
vexations of life:

"Ratio et prudentia curas,
Non locus effusi late maris arbiter, aufert;"

["Reason and prudence, not a place with a commanding view of the
great ocean, banish care."--Horace, Ep., i. 2.]

ambition, avarice, irresolution, fear, and inordinate desires, do not
leave us because we forsake our native country:

"Et
Post equitem sedet atra cura;"

["Black care sits behind the horse man."
--Horace, Od., iii. 1, 40].

they often follow us even to cloisters and philosophical schools; nor
deserts, nor caves, hair-shirts, nor fasts, can disengage us from them:

"Haeret lateri lethalis arundo."

["The fatal shaft adheres to the side."--AEneid, iv. 73.]

One telling