The men whose society and familiarity I covet are those they call sincere and able men; and the image of these makes me disrelish the rest.  It is, if rightly taken, the rarest of our forms, and a form that we chiefly owe to nature.  The end of this commerce is simply privacy, frequentation and conference, the exercise of souls, without other fruit.  In our discourse, all subjects are alike to me; let there be neither weight, nor depth, ’tis all one:  there is yet grace and pertinency; all there is tinted with a mature and constant judgment, and mixed with goodness, freedom, gaiety, and friendship.  ’Tis not only in talking of the affairs of kings and state that our wits discover their force and beauty, but every whit as much in private conferences.  I understand my men even by their silence and smiles; and better discover them, perhaps, at table than in the council.  Hippomachus said, very well, “that he could know the good wrestlers by only seeing them walk in the street.”  If learning please to step into our talk, it shall not be rejected, not magisterial, imperious, and importunate, as-it commonly is, but suffragan and docile itself; we there only seek to pass away our time; when we have a mind to be instructed and preached to, we will go seek this in its throne; please let it humble itself to us for the nonce; for, useful and profitable as it is, I imagine that, at need, we may manage well enough without it, and do our business without its assistance.  A well-descended soul, and practised in the conversation of men, will of herself render herself sufficiently agreeable; art is nothing but the counterpart and register of what such souls produce.

The conversation also of beautiful and honourable women is for me a sweet commerce: 

“Nam nos quoque oculos eruditos habemus.”

     ["For we also have eyes that are versed in the matter.” 
     —­Cicero, Paradox, v. 2.]

If the soul has not therein so much to enjoy, as in the first the bodily senses, which participate more of this, bring it to a proportion next to, though, in my opinion, not equal to the other.  But ’tis a commerce wherein a man must stand a little upon his guard, especially those, where the body can do much, as in me.  I there scalded myself in my youth, and suffered all the torments that poets say befall those who precipitate themselves into love without order and judgment.  It is true that that whipping has made me wiser since: 

              “Quicumque Argolica de classe Capharea fugit,
               Semper ab Euboicis vela retorquet aquis.”

["Whoever of the Grecian fleet has escaped the Capharean rocks, ever
takes care to steer from the Euboean sea.”—­Ovid, Trist., i. i, 83.]