hand, he would not be
afraid to touch his master's heart to the quick, for fear by that means
of losing his preferment: and, on the other hand, being of no high
quality, he would have more easy communication with all sorts of people.
I would have this office limited to only one person; for to allow the
privilege of his liberty and privacy to many, would beget an inconvenient
irreverence; and of that one, I would above all things require the
fidelity of silence.

A king is not to be believed when he brags of his constancy in standing
the shock of the enemy for his glory, if for his profit and amendment he
cannot stand the liberty of a friend's advice, which has no other power
but to pinch his ear, the remainder of its effect being still in his own
hands. Now, there is no condition of men whatever who stand in so great
need of true and free advice and warning, as they do: they sustain a
public life, and have to satisfy the opinion of so many spectators, that,
as those about them conceal from them whatever should divert them from
their own way, they insensibly find themselves involved in the hatred and
detestation of their people, often upon occasions which they might have
avoided without any prejudice even of their pleasures themselves, had
they been advised and set right in time. Their favourites commonly have
more regard to themselves than to their master; and indeed it answers
with them, forasmuch as, in truth, most offices of real friendship, when
applied to the sovereign, are under a rude and dangerous hazard, so that
therein there is great need, not only of very great affection and
freedom, but of courage too.

In fine, all this hodge-podge which I scribble here, is nothing but a
register of the essays of my own life, which, for the internal soundness,
is exemplary enough to take instruction against the grain; but as to
bodily health, no man can furnish out more profitable experience than I,
who present it pure, and no way corrupted and changed by art or opinion.
Experience is properly upon its own dunghill in the subject of physic,
where reason wholly gives it place: Tiberius said that whoever had lived
twenty years ought to be responsible to himself for all things that were
hurtful or wholesome to him, and know how to order himself without
physic;

[All that Suetonius says in his Life of Tiberius is that this
emperor, after he was thirty years old, governed his health without
the aid of physic