Page:Plutarch - Moralia, translator Holland, 1911.djvu/376

354 is it a small sign thereof if thou perceive thy language to be changed from that it was wont to be; for all those who are newly entered into the school of philosophy (to speak generally) affect a kind of speech or style which aimeth at glory and vain ostentation: some you shall hear crowing aloud like cocks and mounting up aloft, by reason of their levity and haughty humour, unto the sublimity and splendour of physical things or secrets in nature; others take pleasure (after the manner of wanton whelps, as Plato saith) in tugging and tearing evermore whatsoever they can catch or light upon; they love to be doing with litigious questions, they go directly to dark problems and sophistical subtleties, and most of them being once plunged in the quillits and quidities of logic, make that (as it were) a means or preparative to flesh themselves for sophistry: marry, there be who go all about collecting and gathering together sententious saws and histories of ancient times; and as Anacharsis was wont to say: That he knew no other use that the Greeks had of their coined pieces of money but to tell and number them, or else to cast account and reckon therewith; even so do they nothing else but count and measure their notable sentences and sayings, without drawing any profit or commodity out of them: and the same befalleth unto them which one of Plato's familiars applied unto his scholars by way of allusion to a speech of Antiphanes: this Antiphanes was wont to say in merriment: That there was a city in the world, whereas the words, so soon as ever they were out of the mouth and pronounced, became frozen in the air by reason of the coldness of the place, and so when the heat of summer came to thaw and melt the same, the inhabitants might hear the talk which had been uttered and delivered in winter; even so (quoth he) it is with many of those who come to hear Plato when they be young; for whatsoever he speaketh and readeth unto them, it is very long ere they understand the same, and hardly when they are become old men: and even after the same sort it fareth with them abovesaid, who stand thus affected universally unto philosophy, until their judgment being well settled and grown to sound resolution, begin to apprehend those things which may deeply imprint in the mind a moral affection and passion of love, yea, and to search and trace those speeches whereof the tracks (as Æsop was wont to say) lead rather in than out. For like as Sophocles said merrily upon a time, by way of derision: That he would first cut off the haughty and stately invention of Æschylus, and then abridge his affected, curious, and artificial disposition, and in the third place change