“Neque submissam et abjectam, neque se efferentem;”

          ["Neither subject and abject, nor obtrusive.” 
          —­Cicero, De Offic., i. 34]

my fortune will have it so.  I am descended from a family that has lived without lustre or tumult, and, time out of mind, particularly ambitious of a character for probity.

Our people nowadays are so bred up to bustle and ostentation, that good nature, moderation, equability, constancy, and such like quiet and obscure qualities, are no more thought on or regarded.  Rough bodies make themselves felt; the smooth are imperceptibly handled:  sickness is felt, health little or not at all; no more than the oils that foment us, in comparison of the pains for which we are fomented.  ’Tis acting for one’s particular reputation and profit, not for the public good, to refer that to be done in the public squares which one may do in the council chamber; and to noon day what might have been done the night before; and to be jealous to do that himself which his colleague can do as well as he; so were some surgeons of Greece wont to perform their operations upon scaffolds in the sight of the people, to draw more practice and profit.  They think that good rules cannot be understood but by the sound of trumpet.  Ambition is not a vice of little people, nor of such modest means as ours.  One said to Alexander:  “Your father will leave you a great dominion, easy and pacific”; this youth was emulous of his father’s victories and of the justice of his government; he would not have enjoyed the empire of the world in ease and peace.  Alcibiades, in Plato, had rather die young, beautiful, rich, noble, and learned, and all this in full excellence, than to stop short of such condition; this disease is, peradventure, excusable in so strong and so full a soul.  When wretched and dwarfish little souls cajole and deceive themselves, and think to spread their fame for having given right judgment in an affair, or maintained the discipline of the guard of a gate of their city, the more they think to exalt their heads the more they show their tails.  This little well-doing has neither body nor life; it vanishes in the first mouth, and goes no further than from one street to another.  Talk of it by all means to your son or your servant, like that old fellow who, having no other auditor of his praises nor approver of his valour, boasted to his chambermaid, crying, “O Perrete, what a brave, clever man hast thou for thy master!  “At the worst, talk of it to yourself, like a councillor of my acquaintance, who, having disgorged a whole cartful of law jargon with great heat and as great folly, coming out of the council chamber to make water, was heard very complacently to mutter betwixt his teeth: 

          “Non nobis, domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam.”

     ["Not unto us, O Lord, not to us:  but unto Thy name be the glory.” 
     —­Psalm cxiii.  I.]