But what, if I take things otherwise than they are?  Perhaps I do; and therefore it is that I accuse my own impatience, and hold, in the first place, that it is equally vicious both in him that is in the right, and in him that is in the wrong; for ’tis always a tyrannic sourness not to endure a form contrary to one’s own:  and, besides, there cannot, in truth, be a greater, more constant, nor more irregular folly than to be moved and angry at the follies of the world, for it principally makes us quarrel with ourselves; and the old philosopher never wanted an occasion for his tears whilst he considered himself.  Miso, one of the seven sages, of a Timonian and Democritic humour, being asked, “what he laughed at, being alone?”—­“That I do laugh alone,” answered he.  How many ridiculous things, in my own opinion, do I say and answer every day that comes over my head? and then how many more, according to the opinion of others?  If I bite my own lips, what ought others to do?  In fine, we must live amongst the living, and let the river run under the bridge without our care, or, at least, without our interference.  In truth, why do we meet a man with a hunch-back, or any other deformity, without being moved, and cannot endure the encounter of a deformed mind without being angry? this vicious sourness sticks more to the judge than to the crime.  Let us always have this saying of Plato in our mouths:  “Do not I think things unsound, because I am not sound in myself?  Am I not myself in fault? may not my observations reflect upon myself?”—­a wise and divine saying, that lashes the most universal and common error of mankind.  Not only the reproaches that we throw in the face of one another, but our reasons also, our arguments and controversies, are reboundable upon us, and we wound ourselves with our own weapons:  of which antiquity has left me enough grave examples.  It was ingeniously and home-said by him, who was the inventor of this sentence: 

“Stercus cuique suum bene olet.”

          ["To every man his own excrements smell well.”—­Erasmus]

We see nothing behind us; we mock ourselves an hundred times a day; when we deride our neighbours; and we detest in others the defects which are more manifest in us, and which we admire with marvellous inadvertency and impudence.  It was but yesterday that I heard a man of understanding and of good rank, as pleasantly as justly scoffing at the folly of another, who did nothing but torment everybody with the catalogue of his genealogy and alliances, above half of them false (for they are most apt to fall into such ridiculous discourses, whose qualities are most dubious and least sure), and yet, would he have looked into himself, he would have discerned himself to be no less intemperate and wearisome in extolling his wife’s pedigree.  O importunate presumption, with which the wife sees herself armed by the hands of her own husband.  Did he understand Latin, we should say to him: