verence, they then knock you
down with the authority of their experience: they have heard, they have
seen, they have done so and so: you are crushed with examples. I should
willingly tell them, that the fruit of a surgeon's experience, is not the
history of his practice and his remembering that he has cured four people
of the plague and three of the gout, unless he knows how thence to
extract something whereon to form his judgment, and to make us sensible
that he has thence become more skillful in his art. As in a concert of
instruments, we do not hear a lute, a harpsichord, or a flute alone, but
one entire harmony, the result of all together. If travel and offices
have improved them, 'tis a product of their understanding to make it
appear. 'Tis not enough to reckon experiences, they must weigh, sort and
distil them, to extract the reasons and conclusions they carry along with
them. There were never so many historians: it is, indeed, good and of
use to read them, for they furnish us everywhere with excellent and
laudable instructions from the magazine of their memory, which,
doubtless, is of great concern to the help of life; but 'tis not that we
seek for now: we examine whether these relaters and collectors of things
are commendable themselves.

I hate all sorts of tyranny, both in word and deed. I am very ready to
oppose myself against those vain circumstances that delude our judgments
by the senses; and keeping my eye close upon those extraordinary
greatnesses, I find that at best they are men, as others are:

"Rarus enim ferme sensus communis in illa
Fortuna."

["For in those high fortunes, common sense is generally rare."
--Juvenal, viii. 73.]

Peradventure, we esteem and look upon them for less than they are, by
reason they undertake more, and more expose themselves; they do not
answer to the charge they have undertaken. There must be more vigour and
strength in the bearer than in the burden; he who has not lifted as much
as he can, leaves you to guess that he has still a strength beyond that,
and that he has not been tried to the utmost of what he is able to do; he
who sinks under his load, makes a discovery of his best, and the weakness
of his shoulders. This is the reason that we see so many silly souls
amongst the learned, and more than those of the better sort: they would
have made good husbandmen, good merchants, and good artisans: their
natural vigour was cut out to