Page:Plutarch - Moralia, translator Holland, 1911.djvu/378

356 being upon a time at the Isthmian games, beheld the fight of the sword-fencers that fought at sharp, and when one of the said champions had received a grievous wound, whereupon the whole theatre set up a cry, he jogging one that was by him (named Ion of Chios), See you not (quoth he) what use and exercise is able to do? the party himself that is hurt saith never a word, but the lookers-on cry out. Brasides chanced among dry figs to light upon a silly mouse that bit him by the finger, and when he had shaken her off and let her go, said thus to himself: See how there is nothing so little and so feeble but it is able to make shift and save its life, if it dare only defend itself. Diogenes, when he saw one make means to drink out of the ball of his hand, cast away the dish or cup that he carried in his budget. Lo, how attentive taking heed and continual exercise maketh men ready and apt to mark, observe and learn from all things that make any way for their good. And this they may the rather do when they join words and deeds together, not only in that sort (as Thucydides speaketh of) by meditating and exercising themselves with the experience of present perils, but also against pleasures, quarrels, and altercations in judgments about defences of causes and magistracies; as making proof thereby of the opinions that they hold, or rather by carriage of themselves, teaching others what opinions they are to hold. For such as yet be learners, and notwithstanding that, intermeddle in affairs like pragmatical persons, spying how they may catch anything out of philosophy, and go therewith incontinently in manner of jugglers with their box, either into the common place and market or into the school which young men frequent, or else to princes' tables, there to set them abroad; we are not to think them philosophers, no more than those to be physicians who only sell medicinable spices, drugs or compound confections; or to speak more properly, such a sophister or counterfeit philosopher as this resembleth the bird that Homer describeth, which forsooth, so soon as he hath gotten anything, carrieth it to his scholars (as the said bird doth in her mouth convey meat to her naked young ones that cannot fly):

converting and distributing naught of all that which he hath gotten to his own nourishment, nor so much as concocting and digesting the same: and therefore we ought of necessity to regard and consider well whether we use any discourse and place