Page:Plutarch - Moralia, translator Holland, 1911.djvu/384

362 low stature, crooked or hunch-backed, and thinketh herein that he doth a worthy and doughty deed; but in the meanwhile covereth and hideth the ordures and filthiness of his vile life, cloaketh the villanous enormities of his manners, his envy, maliciousness, avarice, sensual voluptuousness, as if they were beastly botches or ugly ulcers, suffering nobody to touch them, nay, nor so much as to see them, and all for fear of reproof and rebuke, certes, such a one hath profited but a little, or to speak more truly, never a whit at all; but he that is ready to encounter and set upon these vices, and either is willing and able (which is the chief and principal) to chastise and condemn, yea, and put himself to sorrow for his faults; or if not so, yet in the second place at the least can endure patiently, that another man by his reprehensions and remonstrances should cleanse and purge him; certes, evident it is that such an one hateth and detesteth wickedness indeed, and is in the right way to shake it off: and verily, we ought to avoid the very name and appearance only thereof, and to be ashamed for to be thought and reputed wicked; but he that grieveth more at the substance of vice itself than the infamy that cometh thereof, will never be afraid, but can very well abide both to speak hardly of himself and to hear ill by others, so he may be the better thereby. To this purpose may very well be applied a pretty speech of Diogenes unto a certain yonker, who perceiving that Diogenes had an eye on him within a tavern or tippling-house, withdrew himself quickly more inward, for to be out of his sight: Never do so (quoth he), for the farther thou fliest backward the more shalt thou be still in the tavern; even so a man may say of those that be given to vice, for the more that any one of them seemeth to deny his fault, the farther is he engaged and the deeper sunk in sin; like as poor men, the greater shew that they make of riches, the poorer they be, by reason of their vanity and bragging of that which they have not. But he that profiteth indeed hath for a good precedent and example to follow that famous physician Hippocrates, who both openly confessed and also put down in writing, that he was ignorant in the anatomy of a man's head, and namely, as touching the seams or sutures thereof; and this account will he make, that it were an unworthy indignity if (when such a man as Hippocrates thought not much to publish his own error and ignorance, for fear that others might fall into the like) he who is willing to save himself from perdition, cannot endure to be reproved, nor acknowledge his own ignorance and folly. As for those rules and precepts which are delivered by