Montesinos.—­Oh, how wholesome it is to receive instruction with a willing and a humble mind!  In attending to your discourse I feel myself in the healthy state of a pupil, when without one hostile or contrarient prepossession, he listens to a teacher in whom he has entire confidence.  And I feel also how much better it is that the authority of elder and wiser intellects should pass even for more than it is worth, than that it should be undervalued as in these days, and set at nought.  When any person boasts that he is —

“Nullias addictus jurare in verba magistri,”

the reason of that boast may easily be perceived; it is because he thinks, like Jupiter, that it would be disparaging his own all-wiseness to swear by anything but himself.  But wisdom will as little enter into a proud or a conceited mind as into a malicious one.  In this sense also it may be said, that he who humbleth himself shall be exalted.

Sir Thomas More.—­It is not implicit assent that I require, but reasonable conviction after calm and sufficient consideration.  David was permitted to choose between the three severest dispensations of God’s displeasure, and he made choice of pestilence as the least dreadful.  Ought a reflecting and religious man to be surprised, if some such punishment were dispensed to this country, not less in mercy than in judgment, as the means of averting a more terrible and abiding scourge?  An endemic malady, as destructive as the plague, has naturalised itself among your American brethren, and in Spain.  You have hitherto escaped it, speaking with reference to secondary causes, merely because it has not yet been imported.  But any season may bring it to your own shores; or at any hour it may appear among you homebred.

Montesinos.—­We should have little reason, then, to boast of our improvements in the science of medicine; for our practitioners at Gibraltar found themselves as unable to stop its progress, or mitigate its symptoms, as the most ignorant empirics in the peninsula.

Sir Thomas More.—­You were at one time near enough that pestilence to feel as if you were within its reach?

Montesinos.—­It was in 1800, the year when it first appeared in Andalusia.  That summer I fell in at Cintra with a young German, on the way from his own country to his brothers at Cadiz, where they were established as merchants.  Many days had not elapsed after his arrival in that city when a ship which was consigned to their firm brought with it the infection; and the first news which reached us of our poor acquaintance was that the yellow fever had broken out in his brother’s house, and that he, they, and the greater part of the household, were dead.  There was every reason to fear that the pestilence would extend into Portugal, both governments being, as usual, slow in providing any measures of precaution, and those measures being nugatory when taken.  I was at Faro in the ensuing spring,