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BOOK I, CHAPTER XXVI
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uprightness in his conduct, (c) if there be good judgement and grace in his speech, courage in his sicknesses, modesty in his sports, temperance in his pleasures, (a) indifference in his appetite, —whether it be flesh, fish, wine, or water, —(c) good order in his expenditure. Qui disciplinam suam, non ostentationem scientia, sed legem vitæ putet; quique obtemperet ipse sibi, et decretis pareat.[1] The true mirror of our thought[2] is the course of our lives.

(a) Zeuxidamus replied, to one who asked him why the Lacedæmonians did not reduce to writing the rules of valour and give them to their young men to read, that it was because they wished to accustom them to deeds, not to words.[3] Compare with such a one, after fifteen or sixteen years, one of those Latin-taught schoolboys, who will have spent as much time in simply learning to talk. The world is naught but chatter, and I never saw a man who did not talk rather more than less than he ought; and yet half of our lives is wasted over this. They keep us four or five years learning words and stringing them in sentences; as many more in shaping with them a great body divided in due proportion into four or five parts; and at least five more in learning to mingle and intertwine them concisely in some ingenious fashion. Let us leave this to those who make it their special business.

Going one day to Orleans, I met, in the open country this side of Clery, on their way to Bordeaux, two teachers,[4] about fifty paces one from the other. Farther on behind them, I came upon a troop of horsemen with their master at their head — the late monsieur le comte de la Rochefoucaut. One of my people asked the foremost of the teachers who the gentleman behind him was. He, not having observed the retinue that was following and thinking that his own companion was referred to, replied amusingly: “He’s not a gentleman: he’s a grammarian and I am a logician.” Now

  1. Who regards his doctrine, not as a vain display of knowledge, but as a rule of life; who obeys himself and complies with his own precepts. — Cicero, Tusc. Disp., II, 4.
  2. Nos discours.
  3. See Plutarch, Apothegms of the Lacedæmonians.
  4. Regens.