of their experience:  they have heard, they have seen, they have done so and so:  you are crushed with examples.  I should willingly tell them, that the fruit of a surgeon’s experience, is not the history of his practice and his remembering that he has cured four people of the plague and three of the gout, unless he knows how thence to extract something whereon to form his judgment, and to make us sensible that he has thence become more skillful in his art.  As in a concert of instruments, we do not hear a lute, a harpsichord, or a flute alone, but one entire harmony, the result of all together.  If travel and offices have improved them, ’tis a product of their understanding to make it appear.  ’Tis not enough to reckon experiences, they must weigh, sort and distil them, to extract the reasons and conclusions they carry along with them.  There were never so many historians:  it is, indeed, good and of use to read them, for they furnish us everywhere with excellent and laudable instructions from the magazine of their memory, which, doubtless, is of great concern to the help of life; but ’tis not that we seek for now:  we examine whether these relaters and collectors of things are commendable themselves.

I hate all sorts of tyranny, both in word and deed.  I am very ready to oppose myself against those vain circumstances that delude our judgments by the senses; and keeping my eye close upon those extraordinary greatnesses, I find that at best they are men, as others are: 

          “Rarus enim ferme sensus communis in illa
          Fortuna.”

     ["For in those high fortunes, common sense is generally rare.” 
     —­Juvenal, viii. 73.]

Peradventure, we esteem and look upon them for less than they are, by reason they undertake more, and more expose themselves; they do not answer to the charge they have undertaken.  There must be more vigour and strength in the bearer than in the burden; he who has not lifted as much as he can, leaves you to guess that he has still a strength beyond that, and that he has not been tried to the utmost of what he is able to do; he who sinks under his load, makes a discovery of his best, and the weakness of his shoulders.  This is the reason that we see so many silly souls amongst the learned, and more than those of the better sort:  they would have made good husbandmen, good merchants, and good artisans:  their natural vigour was cut out to that proportion.  Knowledge is a thing of great weight, they faint under it:  their understanding has neither vigour nor dexterity enough to set forth and distribute, to employ or make use of this rich and powerful matter; it has no prevailing virtue but in a strong nature; and such natures are very rare—­and the weak ones, says Socrates, corrupt the dignity of philosophy in the handling, it appears useless and vicious, when lodged in an ill-contrived mind.  They spoil and make fools of themselves: 

              “Humani qualis simulator simius oris,
               Quern puer arridens pretioso stamine serum
               Velavit, nudasque nates ac terga reliquit,
               Ludibrium mensis.”