Tis an instruction proper for the time wherein we live:  we need not harden our courage with these arms of steel; ’tis enough that our shoulders are inured to them:  ’tis enough to dip our pens in ink without dipping them in blood.  If it be grandeur of courage, and the effect of a rare and singular virtue, to contemn friendship, private obligations, a man’s word and relationship, for the common good and obedience to the magistrate, ’tis certainly sufficient to excuse us, that ’tis a grandeur that can have no place in the grandeur of Epaminondas’ courage.

I abominate those mad exhortations of this other discomposed soul,

              “Dum tela micant, non vos pietatis imago
               Ulla, nec adversa conspecti fronte parentes
               Commoveant; vultus gladio turbate verendos.”

["While swords glitter, let no idea of piety, nor the face even of a
father presented to you, move you:  mutilate with your sword those
venerable features “—­Lucan, vii. 320.]

Let us deprive wicked, bloody, and treacherous natures of such a pretence of reason:  let us set aside this guilty and extravagant justice, and stick to more human imitations.  How great things can time and example do!  In an encounter of the civil war against Cinna, one of Pompey’s soldiers having unawares killed his brother, who was of the contrary party, he immediately for shame and sorrow killed himself:  and some years after, in another civil war of the same people, a soldier demanded a reward of his officer for having killed his brother.

A man but ill proves the honour and beauty of an action by its utility:  and very erroneously concludes that every one is obliged to it, and that it becomes every one to do it, if it be of utility: 

“Omnia non pariter rerum sunt omnibus apta.”

               ["All things are not equally fit for all men.” 
               —­Propertius, iii. 9, 7.]

Let us take that which is most necessary and profitable for human society; it will be marriage; and yet the council of the saints find the contrary much better, excluding from it the most venerable vocation of man:  as we design those horses for stallions of which we have the least esteem.

CHAPTER II

OF REPENTANCE

Others form man; I only report him:  and represent a particular one, ill fashioned enough, and whom, if I had to model him anew, I should certainly make something else than what he is but that’s past recalling.  Now, though the features of my picture alter and change, ’tis not, however, unlike:  the world eternally turns round; all things therein are incessantly moving, the earth, the rocks of Caucasus, and the pyramids of Egypt, both by the public motion and their own.  Even constancy itself is no other but a slower and more languishing motion.  I cannot fix my object; ’tis always tottering and reeling