alloy the fruits of knowledge are immaturely gathered and ill digested, and delivered to their recipients quite another thing.  For it is not for knowledge to enlighten a soul that is dark of itself, nor to make a blind man see.  Her business is not to find a man’s eyes, but to guide, govern, and direct them, provided he have sound feet and straight legs to go upon.  Knowledge is an excellent drug, but no drug has virtue enough to preserve itself from corruption and decay, if the vessel be tainted and impure wherein it is put to keep.  Such a one may have a sight clear enough who looks asquint, and consequently sees what is good, but does not follow it, and sees knowledge, but makes no use of it.  Plato’s principal institution in his Republic is to fit his citizens with employments suitable to their nature.  Nature can do all, and does all.  Cripples are very unfit for exercises of the body, and lame souls for exercises of the mind.  Degenerate and vulgar souls are unworthy of philosophy.  If we see a shoemaker with his shoes out at the toes, we say, ’tis no wonder; for, commonly, none go worse shod than they.  In like manner, experience often presents us a physician worse physicked, a divine less reformed, and (constantly) a scholar of less sufficiency, than other people.

Old Aristo of Chios had reason to say that philosophers did their auditors harm, forasmuch as most of the souls of those that heard them were not capable of deriving benefit from instruction, which, if not applied to good, would certainly be applied to ill: 

     ["They proceeded effeminate debauchees from the school of
     Aristippus, cynics from that of Zeno.” 
     —­Cicero, De Natura Deor., iii., 31.]

In that excellent institution that Xenophon attributes to the Persians, we find that they taught their children virtue, as other nations do letters.  Plato tells us that the eldest son in their royal succession was thus brought up; after his birth he was delivered, not to women, but to eunuchs of the greatest authority about their kings for their virtue, whose charge it was to keep his body healthful and in good plight; and after he came to seven years of age, to teach him to ride and to go a-hunting.  When he arrived at fourteen he was transferred into the hands of four, the wisest, the most just, the most temperate, and most valiant of the nation; of whom the first was to instruct him in religion, the second to be always upright and sincere, the third to conquer his appetites and desires, and the fourth to despise all danger.

It is a thing worthy of very great consideration, that in that excellent, and, in truth, for its perfection, prodigious form of civil regimen set down by Lycurgus, though so solicitous of the education of children, as a thing of the greatest concern, and even in the very seat of the Muses, he should make so little mention of learning; as if that generous youth, disdaining all other subjection but that of virtue, ought to be