toical impassibility, let him secure
himself in the bosom of this popular stolidity of mine; what they
performed by virtue, I inure myself to do by temperament. The middle
region harbours storms and tempests; the two extremes, of philosophers
and peasants, concur in tranquillity and happiness:

"Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,
Atque metus omnes et inexorabile fatum
Subjecit pedibus, strepitumque Acherontis avari!
Fortunatus et ille, Deos qui novit agrestes,
Panaque, Sylvanumque senem, Nymphasque sorores!"

["Happy is he who could discover the causes of things, and place
under his feet all fears and inexorable fate, and the sound of
rapacious Acheron: he is blest who knows the country gods, and Pan,
and old Sylvanus, and the sister nymphs."--Virgil, Georg., ii. 490.]

The births of all things are weak and tender; and therefore we should
have our eyes intent on beginnings; for as when, in its infancy, the
danger is not perceived, so when it is grown up, the remedy is as little
to be found. I had every day encountered a million of crosses, harder to
digest in the progress of ambition, than it has been hard for me to curb
the natural propension that inclined me to it:

"Jure perhorrui
Lath conspicuum tollere verticem."

["I ever justly feared to raise my head too high."
--Horace, Od.,iii. 16, 18.]

All public actions are subject to uncertain and various interpretations;
for too many heads judge of them. Some say of this civic employment of
mine (and I am willing to say a word or two about it, not that it is
worth so much, but to give an account of my manners in such things), that
I have behaved myself in it as a man who is too supine and of a languid
temperament; and they have some colour for what they say. I endeavoured
to keep my mind and my thoughts in repose;

"Cum semper natura, tum etiam aetate jam quietus;"

["As being always quiet by nature, so also now by age."
--Cicero, De Petit. Consul., c. 2.]

and if they sometimes lash out upon some rude and sensible impression,
'tis in truth without my advice. Yet from this natural heaviness of
mine, men ought not to conclude a total inability in me (for want of care
and want of sense are two very different things), and much less any
unkindness or ingratitude towards t