secret to all but himself; but habitual confidence in his own
discernment hindered him from suspecting any weakness or mistake. He
wondered that his wit was so little understood, but expected that his
audience would comprehend it by degrees, and persisted all his life to
shew by gross buffoonery, how little the strongest faculties can perform
beyond the limits of their own province.

No. 180. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 7, 1751.

[Greek: Taut eidos sophos isthi, mataen d' Epikouron eason
Poy to kenon zaetein, kai tines ai monades.] AUTOMEDON.

On life, on morals, be thy thoughts employ'd;
Leave to the schools their atoms and their void.

It is somewhere related by Le Clerc, that a wealthy trader of good
understanding, having the common ambition to breed his son a scholar,
carried him to an university, resolving to use his own judgment in the
choice of a tutor. He had been taught, by whatever intelligence, the
nearest way to the heart of an academick, and at his arrival entertained
all who came about him with such profusion, that the professors were
lured by the smell of his table from their books, and flocked round him
with all the cringes of awkward complaisance. This eagerness answered
the merchant's purpose: he glutted them with delicacies, and softened
them with caresses, till he prevailed upon one after another to open his
bosom, and make a discovery of his competitions, jealousies, and
resentments. Having thus learned each man's character, partly from
himself, and partly from his acquaintances, he resolved to find some
other education for his son, and went away convinced, that a scholastick
life has no other tendency than to vitiate the morals and contract the
understanding: nor would he afterwards hear with patience the praises of
the ancient authors, being persuaded that scholars of all ages must have
been the same, and that Xenophon and Cicero were professors of some
former university, and therefore mean and selfish, ignorant and servile,
like those whom he had lately visited and forsaken.

Envy, curiosity, and a sense of the imperfection of our present state,
incline us to estimate the advantages which are in the possession of
others above their real value. Every one must have remarked, what powers
and prerogatives the vulgar imagine to be conferred by learning. A man
of science is expected to excel the unlettered and unenlightened even on
occasions where literature is of no use, and among weak minds,