Page:The whole familiar colloquies of Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam.djvu/399

CONCERNING FRIENDSHIP. 395 carry their hospitable streams through them, and go put just as much and no more than they came in. The River Tigris flows into the Lake Arethusa, and is carried through it like a passenger, that neither the colour, the fish, nor the nature of the water intermixes one with the other. And besides, whereas other rivers generally seem as it were in haste to flow into the sea, yet some rivers, as though they had an aversion to it, before they come at it hide themselves in the earth. There is something of a like nature to be obs.erved concerning the winds : the south wind is pestilential to mankind ; the north wind, on the contrary, healthful; one collects the clouds, the other scatters them. And if we may believe astrologers, there is a certain sympathy and antipathy in the very stars themselves ; some are friendly to man- kind, and others hurtful ; and some are helpful to a man against the influences of the noxious ones : so that there is nothing in nature but by these sympathies and antipathies brings a man injuries and remedies. Jo. And perhaps you may find something aboye the skies too ; for if we believe the magi, there are two genii, a good and a bad, that attend every man. Ep. I think it is very well, and enough for us that we are got so far as heaven, without passing over the limits of it. But let us return to oxen and horses. Jo. In truth, you make a very fine transition. Ep. It is the more admirable to us that in the same species of animals we find ma.nifest footsteps of sympathy and antipathy, no cause of it appearing : for so your horse- coursers and herdmen endeavour to persuade us, that in the same pastures and the same stable one horse shall desire to have one horse nigh him, and will not endure another. Indeed, I am of opinion that there is the like affec- tion in all kind of living creatures, besides the favour of sex, but is in no kind so evident as it is in man. For what Catullus expresses of his Volusius concerning his afiectiqn of inind is manifest in a great many others :

I love thee not, "Volusius ; and if thou askest why ? | I love thee not, Volusius, is all I can reply.

But in adult persons, a person may conjectxire another cause. In chil- dren, that are only led by the sense of nature, what can it be that makes a child love one so dearly, and have such an aversion to another ] I myself, when I was a boy not eight years of age, happened to fall into the acquaintance of one of my own age, or perhaps a year older, of so vain a humour that upon every occasion he would invent, without study, most monstrous lies. If he met a woman, he would say to me, Do yoii see that woman I I answered, Yes, I see her. Why, says he, I have lain with her ten times. If we went over a narrow bridge nigh a mill, when he perceived me shocked at the sight of the water looking black by reason of the depth, he would say, I fell into this place once ; what say you to that ? and there I found the dead body of a man, with a purse tied about him, and three rings in it. And thus he would do continually. And though it is common for others to be delighted with such romances as these, I abhorred him more than a viper, and knew no reason for it, lout only a certain hidden instinct in nature. Nor was this only temporary ; but to this very day I so naturally hate those vain lying persons, that at the very sight of them I perceive my whole constitution to be shocked. Homer" takes notice of something