Jupiter, that it would be disparaging his own all-wiseness
to swear by anything but himself. But wisdom will as little enter into a
proud or a conceited mind as into a malicious one. In this sense also it
may be said, that he who humbleth himself shall be exalted.

_Sir Thomas More_.--It is not implicit assent that I require, but
reasonable conviction after calm and sufficient consideration. David was
permitted to choose between the three severest dispensations of God's
displeasure, and he made choice of pestilence as the least dreadful.
Ought a reflecting and religious man to be surprised, if some such
punishment were dispensed to this country, not less in mercy than in
judgment, as the means of averting a more terrible and abiding scourge?
An endemic malady, as destructive as the plague, has naturalised itself
among your American brethren, and in Spain. You have hitherto escaped
it, speaking with reference to secondary causes, merely because it has
not yet been imported. But any season may bring it to your own shores;
or at any hour it may appear among you homebred.

_Montesinos_.--We should have little reason, then, to boast of our
improvements in the science of medicine; for our practitioners at
Gibraltar found themselves as unable to stop its progress, or mitigate
its symptoms, as the most ignorant empirics in the peninsula.

_Sir Thomas More_.--You were at one time near enough that pestilence to
feel as if you were within its reach?

_Montesinos_.--It was in 1800, the year when it first appeared in
Andalusia. That summer I fell in at Cintra with a young German, on the
way from his own country to his brothers at Cadiz, where they were
established as merchants. Many days had not elapsed after his arrival in
that city when a ship which was consigned to their firm brought with it
the infection; and the first news which reached us of our poor
acquaintance was that the yellow fever had broken out in his brother's
house, and that he, they, and the greater part of the household, were
dead. There was every reason to fear that the pestilence would extend
into Portugal, both governments being, as usual, slow in providing any
measures of precaution, and those measures being nugatory when taken. I
was at Faro in the ensuing spring, at the house of Mr. Lempriere, the
British Consul. Inquiring of him upon the subject, the old man lifted up
his hands, and replied in a passionate manner, which I shall never
forget, "O