Tis a potent malady, and that naturally and
imperceptibly steals into us; a vast provision of study and great
precaution are required to evade the imperfections it loads us with, or
at least to weaken their progress. I find that, notwithstanding all my
entrenchments, it gets foot by foot upon me: I make the best resistance I
can, but I do not know to what at last it will reduce me. But fall out
what will, I am content the world may know, when I am fallen, from what I
fell.

CHAPTER III

OF THREE COMMERCES

We must not rivet ourselves so fast to our humours and complexions: our
chiefest sufficiency is to know how to apply ourselves to divers
employments. 'Tis to be, but not to live, to keep a man's self tied and
bound by necessity to one only course; those are the bravest souls that
have in them the most variety and pliancy. Of this here is an honourable
testimony of the elder Cato:

"Huic versatile ingenium sic pariter ad omnia fuit,
ut natum ad id unum diceres, quodcumque ageret."

["His parts were so pliable to all uses, that one would say he had
been born only to that which he was doing."--Livy, xxxix. 49.]

Had I liberty to set myself forth after my own mode, there is no so
graceful fashion to which I would be so fixed as not to be able to
disengage myself from it; life is an unequal, irregular and multiform
motion. 'Tis not to be a friend to one's self, much less a master 'tis
to be a slave, incessantly to be led by the nose by one's self, and to be
so fixed in one's previous inclinations, that one cannot turn aside nor
writhe one's neck out of the collar. I say this now in this part of my
life, wherein I find I cannot easily disengage myself from the
importunity of my soul, which cannot ordinarily amuse itself but in
things of limited range, nor employ itself otherwise than entirely and
with all its force; upon the lightest subject offered it expands and
stretches it to that degree as therein to employ its utmost power;
wherefore it is that idleness is to me a very painful labour, and very
prejudicial to my health. Most men's minds require foreign matter to
exercise and enliven them; mine has rather need of it to sit still and
repose itself,

"Vitia otii negotio discutienda sunt,"

["The vices of sloth are to be shaken off by business."
--Seneca, Ep. 56.]

for its chiefest and hardest study is to study itself. Books are to it