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BOOK I, CHAPTER XXVIII
257

concern that end. It can not matter of what religion my physician is, and my lawyer; that consideration has nothing in common with the duties of the friendship which they owe me. And in the domestic relations which those who serve me form with me, I take the same position: I question little about a footman’s chastity; I enquire if he is diligent; and am not so anxious about a gambling muleteer as about one wanting in strength, or about a profane cook as about an ignorant one. I do not busy myself with saying what should be done in the world, — enough other people busy themselves about that, — but what I do.

Mihi sic usus est; tibi, ut opus est facto, face.[1]

In the familiar intercourse of the table, I ask for the agreeable, not the discreet; in bed, beauty before virtue; in the companionship of thoughts, cleverness, even without integrity.[2]

(a) Just as he who was found bestriding a stick, in play with his children,[3] begged the man who caught him at it to say nothing about it until he was himself a father thinking that the emotion which would then be born in his heart would make him a just judge of such an act, I also should desire to speak to people who have experienced what I describe; but knowing how far removed from the ordinary wont such a friendship is, and how rare it is, I do not expect to find any good judge of it. For the discourses that antiquity has left us on this subject seem to me cold[4] in comparison with the feeling that I have of it; and on this point the facts surpass the very precepts of philosophy: —

Nil ego contulerim jucundo sanus amico.[5]

Old Menander called him happy who had met merely the

  1. ↑ Such is my custom; as for you, do as you have occasion. — Terence, Heautontimorumenos, I, 1.28.
  2. ↑ A la familiarité de la table j'associe le plesant, non le prudant; au lict ta beauté avant la bonté; en la societé du discours, la suffisance, voire sans la preud’ homie.
  3. ↑ See Plutarch, Life of Agesilaus.
  4. ↑ Laches.
  5. ↑ So long as I am in my senses, I shall find nothing to compare with an agreeable friend. — Horace, Satires, I, 5.44.
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