“Sunt qui nihil suadent, quam quod se imitari posse confidunt.”

     ["There are who persuade nothing but what they believe they can
     imitate themselves.”—­Cicero, De Orator., c. 7.]

Crawling upon the slime of the earth, I do not for all that cease to observe up in the clouds the inimitable height of some heroic souls.  ’Tis a great deal for me to have my judgment regular and just, if the effects cannot be so, and to maintain this sovereign part, at least, free from corruption; ’tis something to have my will right and good where my legs fail me.  This age wherein we live, in our part of the world at least, is grown so stupid, that not only the exercise, but the very imagination of virtue is defective, and seems to be no other but college jargon: 

“Virtutem verba putant, ut
Lucum ligna:” 

["They think words virtue, as they think mere wood a sacred grove.” 
—­Horace, Ep., i. 6, 31.]

“Quam vereri deberent, etiam si percipere non possent.”

["Which they ought to reverence, though they cannot comprehend.” 
—­Cicero, Tusc.  Quas., v. 2.]

’Tis a gewgaw to hang in a cabinet or at the end of the tongue, as on the tip of the ear, for ornament only.  There are no longer virtuous actions extant; those actions that carry a show of virtue have yet nothing of its essence; by reason that profit, glory, fear, custom, and other suchlike foreign causes, put us on the way to produce them.  Our justice also, valour, courtesy, may be called so too, in respect to others and according to the face they appear with to the public; but in the doer it can by no means be virtue, because there is another end proposed, another moving cause.  Now virtue owns nothing to be hers, but what is done by herself and for herself alone.

In that great battle of Plataea, that the Greeks under the command of Pausanias gained against Mardonius and the Persians, the conquerors, according to their custom, coming to divide amongst them the glory of the exploit, attributed to the Spartan nation the pre-eminence of valour in the engagement.  The Spartans, great judges of virtue, when they came to determine to what particular man of their nation the honour was due of having the best behaved himself upon this occasion, found that Aristodemus had of all others hazarded his person with the greatest bravery; but did not, however, allow him any prize, by reason that his virtue had been incited by a desire to clear his reputation from the reproach of his miscarriage at the business of Thermopylae, and to die bravely to wipe off that former blemish.

Our judgments are yet sick, and obey the humour of our depraved manners.  I observe most of the wits of these times pretend to ingenuity, by endeavouring to blemish and darken the glory of the bravest and most generous actions of former ages, putting one vile interpretation or another upon them, and forging and supposing vain causes and motives for the noble things they did:  a mighty subtlety indeed!  Give me the greatest and most unblemished action that ever the day beheld, and I will contrive a hundred plausible drifts and ends to obscure it.  God knows, whoever will stretch them out to the full, what diversity of images our internal wills suffer under.  They do not so maliciously play the censurers, as they do it ignorantly and rudely in all their detractions.