ring vanity itself in repute, and folly too, if it produce
me any pleasure; and let myself follow my own natural inclinations,
without carrying too strict a hand upon them.

I have seen elsewhere houses in ruins, and statues both of gods and men:
these are men still. 'Tis all true; and yet, for all that, I cannot so
often revisit the tomb of that so great and so puissant city,--[Rome]--
that I do not admire and reverence it. The care of the dead is
recommended to us; now, I have been bred up from my infancy with these
dead; I had knowledge of the affairs of Rome long before I had any of
those of my own house; I knew the Capitol and its plan before I knew the
Louvre, and the Tiber before I knew the Seine. The qualities and
fortunes of Lucullus, Metellus, and Scipio have ever run more in my head
than those of any of my own country; they are all dead; so is my father
as absolutely dead as they, and is removed as far from me and life in
eighteen years as they are in sixteen hundred: whose memory,
nevertheless, friendship and society, I do not cease to embrace and
utilise with a perfect and lively union. Nay, of my own inclination, I
pay more service to the dead; they can no longer help themselves, and
therefore, methinks, the more require my assistance: 'tis there that
gratitude appears in its full lustre. The benefit is not so generously
bestowed, where there is retrogradation and reflection. Arcesilaus,
going to visit Ctesibius, who was sick, and finding him in a very poor
condition, very finely conveyed some money under his pillow, and, by
concealing it from him, acquitted him, moreover, from the acknowledgment
due to such a benefit. Such as have merited from me friendship and
gratitude have never lost these by being no more; I have better and more
carefully paid them when gone and ignorant of what I did; I speak most
affectionately of my friends when they can no longer know it. I have had
a hundred quarrels in defending Pompey and for the cause of Brutus; this
acquaintance yet continues betwixt us; we have no other hold even on
present things but by fancy. Finding myself of no use to this age, I
throw myself back upon that other, and am so enamoured of it, that the
free, just, and flourishing state of that ancient Rome (for I neither
love it in its birth nor its old age) interests and impassionates me;
and therefore I cannot so often revisit the sites of their streets and
houses, and those ruins profound even to