persons turn against and
spit out and refuse the daintiest and most costly viands, though people
offer them and almost force them down their throats, but on another
occasion, when their condition is different, their respiration good,
their blood in a healthy state, and their natural warmth restored, they
get up, and enjoy and make a good meal of simple bread and cheese and
cress? Such, also, is the effect of reason on the mind. You will be
contented, if you have learned what is good and honourable. You will
live daintily and be a king in poverty, and enjoy a quiet and private
life as much as the public life of general or statesman. By the aid of
philosophy you will live not unpleasantly, for you will learn to extract
pleasure from all places and things: wealth will make you happy,
because it will enable you to benefit many; and poverty, as you will not
then have many anxieties; and glory, for it will make you honoured; and
obscurity, for you will then be safe from envy.

[213] Happiness comes from within, not from without. The
true seat of happiness is the mind. Compare Milton,
"Paradise Lost," Book i. 254, 255:--

"The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven."

[214] Homeric Epigrammata, xiii. 5.

[215] Wyttenbach thinks these lines are by Menander.
Plutarch quotes them again "On Contentedness of Mind," Sec.
xi.

[216] Hesiod, "Works and Days," 705.

[217] Plato, "Republic," ix. p. 571, D. Quoted again,
"How one may be aware of one's Progress in Virtue," Sec.
xii.

[218] And so Dr. Young truly says,--

"A man of pleasure is a man of pains."

_Night Thoughts._

ON MORAL VIRTUE.

Sec. I. I propose to discuss what is called and appears to be moral virtue
(which differs mainly from contemplative virtue in that it has emotion
for its matter, and reason for its form), what its nature is, and how it
subsists, and whether that part of the soul which takes it in is
furnished with reason of its own, or participates in something foreign,
and if the latter, whether as things that are mixed with something
better than themselves, or rather as that which is subject to
superintendence and command, and may be said to share in the power of
that which commands. For I think it is clear that virtue can exist and
continue altogether free from matter and mixture. My best course will b