Page:Plutarch - Moralia, translator Holland, 1911.djvu/267

Rh hard and troublesome cure it is that philosophy hath undertaken, namely, to heal the disease of much prating; for that the medicine and remedy which she useth be words that must be received by hearing; and these great talkers will abide to hear no man, for that they have all the words themselves, and talk continually; so that the first mischief of those who cannot hold their tongue and keep silence is this; That they neither can nor will give ear to another; insomuch as it is a wilful kind of deafness in men, who seem thereby to control nature and complain of her, in that where she hath allowed them two ears, she hath given them but one tongue. If then Euripides said very well unto a foolish auditor of his: a man may more truly and justly say unto (or rather of) a prating fellow:

And in truth, more properly it may be said: That one poureth good advertisements about such an one and beside him rather, than into him, so long as he either speaketh unto him that listeneth not, or giveth no ear unto them that speak: for if a prattling fellow chance to hear some short and little tale, such is the nature of this disease called garrulity, that his hearing is but a kind of taking his wind new, to babble it forth again immediately, much more than it was, or like a whirlpool which wArhatsoever it taketh once, the same it sendeth up again very often with the vantage.

Within the city Olympia there was a porch or gallery called Heptaphonos, for that from one voice by sundry reflections and reverberations it rendered seven echoes: but if some speech come to the ears of a babbler, and enter never so little in, by ind by it resoundeth again on every side.

insomuch, as a man may well say: That the conducts and passages of their hearing reach not to the brain where their soul and mind is seated, but only to their tongue: by reason thereof, whereas in others the words that be heard do rest in