keeps such a clatter with his philosophy,
when, behold! he goes mad with a love philtre. Is it to be imagined
that an apoplexy will not stun Socrates as well as a porter? Some men
have forgotten their own names by the violence of a disease; and a slight
wound has turned the judgment of others topsy-turvy. Let him be as wise
as he will, after all he is but a man; and than that what is there more
frail, more miserable, or more nothing? Wisdom does not force our
natural dispositions,

"Sudores itaque, et pallorem exsistere toto
Corpore, et infringi linguam, vocemque aboriri,
Caligare oculos, sonere aures, succidere artus,
Demque concidere, ex animi terrore, videmus."

["Sweat and paleness come over the whole body, the tongue is
rendered powerless, the voice dies away, the eyes are darkened,
there is ringing in the ears, the limbs sink under us by the
influence of fear."--Lucretius, iii. 155.]

he must shut his eyes against the blow that threatens him; he must
tremble upon the margin of a precipice, like a child; nature having
reserved these light marks of her authority, not to be forced by our
reason and the stoic virtue, to teach man his mortality and our weakness;
he turns pale with fear, red with shame, and groans with the cholic, if
not with desperate outcry, at least with hoarse and broken voice:

"Humani a se nihil alienum putet."

["Let him not think himself exempt from that which is incidental to
men in general."--Terence, Heauton, i. 1, 25.]

The poets, that feign all things at pleasure, dare not acquit their
greatest heroes of tears:

"Sic fatur lacrymans, classique immittit habenas."

["Thus he speaks, weeping, and then sets sail with his fleet."
--Aeneid, vi. i.]

'Tis sufficient for a man to curb and moderate his inclinations, for
totally to suppress them is not in him to do. Even our great Plutarch,
that excellent and perfect judge of human actions, when he sees Brutus
and Torquatus kill their children, begins to doubt whether virtue could
proceed so far, and to question whether these persons had not rather been
stimulated by some other passion.--[Plutarch, Life of Publicola, c. 3.]
--All actions exceeding the ordinary bounds are liable to sinister
interpretation, for as much as our liking no more holds with what is
above than with what is below it.

Let us leave tha