try, he does not lament the
tyrant; but he laments his brother: one part of his duty is performed;
let us give him leave to perform the other.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

OF SOLITUDE

Let us pretermit that long comparison betwixt the active and the solitary
life; and as for the fine sayings with which ambition and avarice
palliate their vices, that we are not born for ourselves but for the
public,--[This is the eulogium passed by Lucan on Cato of Utica, ii.
383.]--let us boldly appeal to those who are in public affairs; let them
lay their hands upon their hearts, and then say whether, on the contrary,
they do not rather aspire to titles and offices and that tumult of the
world to make their private advantage at the public expense. The corrupt
ways by which in this our time they arrive at the height to which their
ambitions aspire, manifestly enough declares that their ends cannot be
very good. Let us tell ambition that it is she herself who gives us a
taste of solitude; for what does she so much avoid as society? What does
she so much seek as elbowroom? A man many do well or ill everywhere; but
if what Bias says be true, that the greatest part is the worse part, or
what the Preacher says: there is not one good of a thousand:

"Rari quippe boni: numero vix sunt totidem quot
Thebarum portae, vel divitis ostia Nili,"

["Good men forsooth are scarce: there are hardly as many as there
are gates of Thebes or mouths of the rich Nile."
--Juvenal, Sat., xiii. 26.]

the contagion is very dangerous in the crowd. A man must either imitate
the vicious or hate them both are dangerous things, either to resemble
them because they are many or to hate many because they are unresembling
to ourselves. Merchants who go to sea are in the right when they are
cautious that those who embark with them in the same bottom be neither
dissolute blasphemers nor vicious other ways, looking upon such society
as unfortunate. And therefore it was that Bias pleasantly said to some,
who being with him in a dangerous storm implored the assistance of the
gods: "Peace, speak softly," said he, "that they may not know you are
here in my company."--[Diogenes Laertius]--And of more pressing
example, Albuquerque, viceroy in the Indies for Emmanuel, king of
Portugal, in an extreme peril of shipwreck, took a young boy upon his
shoulders, for this only end that, in the society of their common danger
his innocence