knew discreetly to connive at this and other truantries of the same nature; for by this means I ran through Virgil’s AEneid, and then Terence, and then Plautus, and then some Italian comedies, allured by the sweetness of the subject; whereas had he been so foolish as to have taken me off this diversion, I do really believe, I had brought away nothing from the college but a hatred of books, as almost all our young gentlemen do.  But he carried himself very discreetly in that business, seeming to take no notice, and allowing me only such time as I could steal from my other regular studies, which whetted my appetite to devour those books.  For the chief things my father expected from their endeavours to whom he had delivered me for education, were affability and good-humour; and, to say the truth, my manners had no other vice but sloth and want of metal.  The fear was not that I should do ill, but that I should do nothing; nobody prognosticated that I should be wicked, but only useless; they foresaw idleness, but no malice; and I find it falls out accordingly:  The complaints I hear of myself are these:  “He is idle, cold in the offices of friendship and relation, and in those of the public, too particular, too disdainful.”  But the most injurious do not say, “Why has he taken such a thing?  Why has he not paid such an one?” but, “Why does he part with nothing?  Why does he not give?” And I should take it for a favour that men would expect from me no greater effects of supererogation than these.  But they are unjust to exact from me what I do not owe, far more rigorously than they require from others that which they do owe.  In condemning me to it, they efface the gratification of the action, and deprive me of the gratitude that would be my due for it; whereas the active well-doing ought to be of so much the greater value from my hands, by how much I have never been passive that way at all.  I can the more freely dispose of my fortune the more it is mine, and of myself the more I am my own.  Nevertheless, if I were good at setting out my own actions, I could, peradventure, very well repel these reproaches, and could give some to understand, that they are not so much offended, that I do not enough, as that I am able to do a great deal more than I do.

Yet for all this heavy disposition of mine, my mind, when retired into itself, was not altogether without strong movements, solid and clear judgments about those objects it could comprehend, and could also, without any helps, digest them; but, amongst other things, I do really believe, it had been totally impossible to have made it to submit by violence and force.  Shall I here acquaint you with one faculty of my youth?  I had great assurance of countenance, and flexibility of voice and gesture, in applying myself to any part I undertook to act:  for before—­

          “Alter ab undecimo tum me vix ceperat annus,”

     ["I had just entered my twelfth year.”—­Virgil, Bucol., 39.]