Page:Essays Vol 1 (Ives, 1925).pdf/225

Rh tern, without turning our eyes toward the book. A pitiful competence is a competence purely bookish! I look for it to serve as ornament, not as foundation, according to Plato’s opinion, who said that firmness, trust, and sincerity were true philosophy; other kinds of knowledge, those which had a different aim, were but deceitful.

(a) I should like to have Paluel or Pompey, those fine dancers of my time, teach their capers just by seeing them performed without our moving from our seats, as these persons seek to instruct our understanding without jogging it; (c) or that we should be taught to manage a horse, or a pike, or a lute, or the voice, without practice, as these persons seek to teach us to think well and talk well, without practice in talking or thinking. (a) Now, in this study, all that presents itself to our eyes serves as a book to learn from: the mischief of a page, the stupidity of a servant, a remark at table, are so many new subjects.

For this reason, intercourse with men is wonderfully proper for it, and travel in foreign countries, not simply to bring back, after the manner of our French nobility, the number of feet of the Santa Rotonda, or the elegance of Signora Livia’s drawers; or, like others, how much longer or broader the face of Nero is in some old ruin, than it is on some equally old coin; but chiefly to bring back the characteristics of those nations and their manner of living, and to rub and file our wits against those of others. I would have him begin to be taken about in his tender years, and especially, to kill two birds with one stone, among the neighbouring nations whose languages are most unlike ours, to which the tongue can not be wonted unless you train it in good season. And also, it is an opinion accepted by every one that it is not well to bring up a child in the lap of his parents: their natural affection softens and relaxes them too much, even the wisest; they are capable neither of punishing his faults nor of allowing him to be nurtured roughly,