fool, ’tis at my own expense, and nobody else is concerned in’t; for ’tis a folly that will die with me, and that no one is to inherit.  We hear but of two or three of the ancients, who have beaten this path, and yet I cannot say if it was after this manner, knowing no more of them but their names.  No one since has followed the track:  ’tis a rugged road, more so than it seems, to follow a pace so rambling and uncertain, as that of the soul; to penetrate the dark profundities of its intricate internal windings; to choose and lay hold of so many little nimble motions; ’tis a new and extraordinary undertaking, and that withdraws us from the common and most recommended employments of the world.  ’Tis now many years since that my thoughts have had no other aim and level than myself, and that I have only pried into and studied myself:  or, if I study any other thing, ’tis to apply it to or rather in myself.  And yet I do not think it a fault, if, as others do by other much less profitable sciences, I communicate what I have learned in this, though I am not very well pleased with my own progress.  There is no description so difficult, nor doubtless of so great utility, as that of a man’s self:  and withal, a man must curl his hair and set out and adjust himself, to appear in public:  now I am perpetually tricking myself out, for I am eternally upon my own description.  Custom has made all speaking of a man’s self vicious, and positively interdicts it, in hatred to the boasting that seems inseparable from the testimony men give of themselves: 

“In vitium ducit culpae fuga.”

     ["The avoiding a mere fault often leads us into a greater.” 
     Or:  “The escape from a fault leads into a vice”
     —­Horace, De Arte Poetics, verse 31.]

Instead of blowing the child’s nose, this is to take his nose off altogether.  I think the remedy worse than the disease.  But, allowing it to be true that it must of necessity be presumption to entertain people with discourses of one’s self, I ought not, pursuing my general design, to forbear an action that publishes this infirmity of mine, nor conceal the fault which I not only practise but profess.  Notwithstanding, to speak my thought freely, I think that the custom of condemning wine, because some people will be drunk, is itself to be condemned; a man cannot abuse anything but what is good in itself; and I believe that this rule has only regard to the popular vice.  They are bits for calves, with which neither the saints whom we hear speak so highly of themselves, nor the philosophers, nor the divines will be curbed; neither will I, who am as little the one as the other, If they do not write of it expressly, at all events, when the occasions arise, they don’t hesitate to put themselves on the public highway.  Of what does Socrates treat more largely than of himself?  To what does he more direct and address the discourses of his disciples, than to speak of themselves, not of