ing (say they) is a man
with whom you may prevail when you have need there should be law, or
when you have need there should be no law; he has favors in the right,
and he frowns not in the wrong place; he knows his friends from
his enemies. But laws are deaf, inexorable things, such as make no
difference between a gentleman and an ordinary fellow; a man can never
be merry for them, for to trust altogether to his own innocence is a sad
life." Unhappy wantons! Scipio, on the other side, when he was but a boy
(about two or three and twenty), being informed that certain patricians
of Roman gentlemen, through a qualm upon the defeat which Hannibal had
given them at Cannae, were laying their heads together and contriving
their flight with the transportation of their goods out of Rome, drew
his sword, and setting himself at the door of the chamber where they
were at council, protested "that who did not immediately swear not to
desert the commonwealth, he would make his soul to desert his body." Let
men argue as they please for monarchy, or against a commonwealth, the
world shall never see any man so sottish or wicked as in cool blood to
prefer the education of the sons of Brutus before that of Scipio; and
of this mould, except a Melius or a Manlius, was the whole youth of that
commonwealth, though not ordinarily so well cast.

Now the health of a government and the education of the youth being
of the same pulse, no wonder if it has been the constant practice of
well-ordered commonwealths to commit the care and feeling of it to
public magistrates. A duty that was performed in such a manner by the
Areopagites, as is elegantly praised by Isocrates, "the Athenians (says
he) write not their laws upon dead walls, nor content themselves with
having ordained punishments for crimes, but provide in such a way, by
the education of their youth, that there be no crimes for punishment."
He speaks of those laws which regarded manners, not of those orders
which concerned the administration of the commonwealth, lest you should
think he contradicts Xenophon and Polybius. The children of Lacedaemon,
at the seventh year of their age, were delivered to the poedonomi, or
schoolmasters, not mercenary, but magistrates of the commonwealth, to
which they were accountable for their charge; and by these at the age of
fourteen they were presented to other magistrates called the beidioei,
having the inspection of the games and exercises, among which that of