To instance in myself:  I have sometimes known my friends call that prudence in me, which was merely fortune; and repute that courage and patience, which was judgment and opinion; and attribute to me one title for another, sometimes to my advantage and sometimes otherwise.  As to the rest, I am so far from being arrived at the first and most perfect degree of excellence, where virtue is turned into habit, that even of the second I have made no great proofs.  I have not been very solicitous to curb the desires by which I have been importuned.  My virtue is a virtue, or rather an innocence, casual and accidental.  If I had been born of a more irregular complexion, I am afraid I should have made scurvy work; for I never observed any great stability in my soul to resist passions, if they were never so little vehement:  I know not how to nourish quarrels and debates in my own bosom, and, consequently, owe myself no great thanks that I am free from several vices: 

              “Si vitiis mediocribus et mea paucis
               Mendosa est natura, alioqui recta, velut si
               Egregio inspersos reprehendas corpore naevos:” 

["If my nature be disfigured only with slight and few vices, and is
otherwise just, it is as if you should blame moles on a fair body.” 
—­Horatius, Sat., i. 6, 65.]

I owe it rather to my fortune than my reason.  She has caused me to be descended of a race famous for integrity and of a very good father; I know not whether or no he has infused into me part of his humours, or whether domestic examples and the good education of my infancy have insensibly assisted in the work, or, if I was otherwise born so: 

                    “Seu Libra, seu me Scorpius adspicit
                    Formidolosus, pars violentior
                    Natalis hors, seu tyrannus
                    Hesperive Capricornus undae:” 

     ["Whether the Balance or dread Scorpio, more potent over my natal
     hour, aspects me, or Capricorn, supreme over the Hesperian sea.” 
     —­Horace, Od., ii. 117.]

but so it is, that I have naturally a horror for most vices.  The answer of Antisthenes to him who asked him, which was the best apprenticeship “to unlearn evil,” seems to point at this.  I have them in horror, I say, with a detestation so natural, and so much my own, that the same instinct and impression I brought of them with me from my nurse, I yet retain, and no temptation whatever has had the power to make me alter it.  Not so much as my own discourses, which in some things lashing out of the common road might seem easily to license me to actions that my natural inclination makes me hate.  I will say a prodigious thing, but I will say it, however:  I find myself in many things more under reputation by my manners than by my opinion, and my concupiscence less debauched than my reason.  Aristippus instituted opinions so bold in favour of