Jeronimus.  Stay here for a moment; I will go and talk to the Lieutenant. (Enter the Lieutenant.) Oh, my dear Lieutenant, you have always been a friend of our house.  The person who has enlisted as a soldier is engaged to my only daughter, who is much in love with him.  Set him free again.  I shall be glad to present you with a hundred rix-dollars, if you do.  I admit that at first I was delighted myself that he had been punished in such a way, for his singular behavior had exasperated me, and all the good folk here in the village, against him.  But when I saw him in this plight, and at the same time heard him lament his former folly and promise amendment, my heart was ready to burst with sympathy.

Lieutenant.  Listen, my dear Monsieur Jeronimus.  What I have done has been only for his own good.  I know that he is engaged to your daughter, and therefore merely for the good of your house I have reduced him to this condition and treated him with such great harshness, so that he might he brought to confess his sins.  But for your sake I will give the money to the poor, inasmuch as I hear that he has experienced a change of heart.  Let him come here.—­Listen, my friend, your parents have spent much on you in the hope that you would become an honor and a comfort to them in their old age.  But you go off a sensible fellow and come back entirely deranged, arouse the whole village, advance strange opinions, and defend them with stubbornness.  If that is to be the fruit of studies, then one ought to wish that there never had been any books.  It seems to me that the principal thing a man ought to learn in school is just the opposite of what you are infected with, and that a learned man ought particularly to be distinguished from others in that he is more temperate, modest, and considerate in his speech than the uneducated.  For true philosophy teaches us that we ought to restrain and quiet disagreements, and to give up our opinions as soon as we are persuaded, even by the humblest person, that they are mistaken.  The first rule of philosophy is, Know thyself; and the further one advances, the lower opinion one should have of himself, the more one should realize what there remains to be learned.  But you make philosophy into a kind of fencing, and consider a man a philosopher if he can warp the truth by subtle distinctions and talk himself out of any opinion; in so doing you incur hatred and bring contempt upon learning, for people imagine that your extraordinary manners are the natural fruits of education.  The best advice I can give you is to strive to forget, and to rid your head of what you have burned so much midnight oil in learning; and that you take up some calling in which you can make your way to success; or, if you are bound to pursue your studies, that you go about them in some other fashion.

Montanus.  Oh, my good sir, I will follow your advice, and do my best to be a different man from now on.