h that I embrace more by esteem than affection; and they have some
also so elevated and extraordinary that I cannot embrace them so much as
by esteem, forasmuch as I cannot conceive them. That fancy was singular
in a man who thought the whole world his city; it is true that he
disdained travel, and had hardly ever set his foot out of the Attic
territories. What say you to his complaint of the money his friends
offered to save his life, and that he refused to come out of prison by
the mediation of others, in order not to disobey the laws in a time when
they were otherwise so corrupt? These examples are of the first kind for
me; of the second, there are others that I could find out in the same
person: many of these rare examples surpass the force of my action, but
some of them, moreover, surpass the force of my judgment.

Besides these reasons, travel is in my opinion a very profitable
exercise; the soul is there continually employed in observing new and
unknown things, and I do not know, as I have often said a better school
wherein to model life than by incessantly exposing to it the diversity
of so many other lives, fancies, and usances, and by making it relish a
perpetual variety of forms of human nature. The body is, therein,
neither idle nor overwrought; and that moderate agitation puts it in
breath. I can keep on horseback, tormented with the stone as I am,
without alighting or being weary, eight or ten hours together:

"Vires ultra sorternque senectae."

["Beyond the strength and lot of age."--AEneid, vi. 114.]

No season is enemy to me but the parching heat of a scorching sun; for
the umbrellas made use of in Italy, ever since the time of the ancient
Romans, more burden a man's arm than they relieve his head. I would fain
know how it was that the Persians, so long ago and in the infancy of
luxury, made ventilators where they wanted them, and planted shades, as
Xenophon reports they did. I love rain, and to dabble in the dirt, as
well as ducks do. The change of air and climate never touches me; every
sky is alike; I am only troubled with inward alterations which I breed
within myself, and those are not so frequent in travel. I am hard to be
got out, but being once upon the road, I hold out as well as the best.
I take as much pains in little as in great attempts, and am as solicitous
to equip myself for a short journey, if but to visit a neighbour, as for
the longest voyage. I have le