grows proud to see us truckle under her. She will
surrender upon much better terms to them who make head against her: a man
must oppose and stoutly set himself against her. In retiring and giving
ground, we invite and pull upon ourselves the ruin that threatens us. As
the body is more firm in an encounter, the more stiffly and obstinately
it applies itself to it, so is it with the soul.

But let us come to examples, which are the proper game of folks of such
feeble force as myself; where we shall find that it is with pain as with
stones, that receive a brighter or a duller lustre according to the foil
they are set in, and that it has no more room in us than we are pleased
to allow it:

"Tantum doluerunt, quantum doloribus se inseruerunt."

["They suffered so much the more, by how much more they gave way to
suffering."--St. Augustin, De Civit. Dei, i. 10.]

We are more sensible of one little touch of a surgeon's lancet than of
twenty wounds with a sword in the heat of fight. The pains of
childbearing, said by the physicians and by God himself to be great, and
which we pass through with so many ceremonies--there are whole nations
that make nothing of them. I set aside the Lacedaemonian women, but what
else do you find in the Swiss among our foot-soldiers, if not that, as
they trot after their husbands, you see them to-day carry the child at
their necks that they carried yesterday in their bellies? The
counterfeit Egyptians we have amongst us go themselves to wash theirs,
so soon as they come into the world, and bathe in the first river they
meet. Besides so many wenches as daily drop their children by stealth,
as they conceived them, that fair and noble wife of Sabinus, a patrician
of Rome, for another's interest, endured alone, without help, without
crying out, or so much as a groan, the bearing of twins.--[Plutarch, On
Love, c. 34.]--A poor simple boy of Lacedaemon having stolen a fox (for
they more fear the shame of stupidity in stealing than we do the
punishment of the knavery), and having got it under his coat, rather
endured the tearing out of his bowels than he would discover his theft.
And another offering incense at a sacrifice, suffered himself to be
burned to the bone by a coal that fell into his sleeve, rather than
disturb the ceremony. And there have been a great number, for a sole
trial of virtue, following their institutions, who have at seven years
old endured to be whipped