errors which they retail to you?

OSMIN:

I should have ground for complaint against a doctor who showed me all
the harmful plants, and who did not show me one salutary plant.

SELIM:

I am not a doctor, and you are not ill; but it seems to me I should be
giving you a very good prescription if I said to you: "Put not your
trust in all the inventions of charlatans, worship God, be an honest
man, and believe that two and two make four."

_NEW NOVELTIES_

It seems that the first words of Ovid's "Metamorphoses," _In nova fert
animus_, are the motto of the human race. Nobody is touched by the
admirable spectacle of the sun which rises, or rather seems to rise,
every day; everybody runs to see the smallest little meteor which
appears for an instant in that accumulation of vapours, called the sky,
that surround the earth.

An itinerant bookseller does not burden himself with a Virgil, with a
Horace, but with a new book, even though it be detestable. He draws you
aside and says to you: "Sir, do you want some books from Holland?"

From the beginning of the world women have complained of the fickleness
that is imputed to them in favour of the first new object which presents
itself, and whose novelty is often its only merit. Many ladies (it must
be confessed, despite the infinite respect we have for them) have
treated men as they complain they have themselves been treated; and the
story of Gioconda is much older than Ariosto.

Perhaps this universal taste for novelty is one of nature's favours.
People cry to us: "Be content with what you have, desire nothing that is
beyond your estate, restrain your curiosity, tame your intellectual
disquiet." These are very good maxims; but if we had always followed
them, we should still be eating acorns, we should be sleeping in the
open air, and we should not have had Corneille, Racine, Moliere,
Poussin, Lebrun, Lemoine or Pigalle.

_PHILOSOPHER_

Philosopher, _lover of wisdom_, that is to say, _of truth_. All
philosophers have had this dual character; there is not one in antiquity
who has not given mankind examples of virtue and lessons in moral
truths. They have all contrived to be deceived about natural philosophy;
but natural philosophy is so little necessary for the conduct of life,
that the philosophers had no need of it. It has taken centuries to learn
a part of nature's laws. One day was sufficient for a wise man to learn
the duties of man.

The philosop