ds 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 might serve to protect him, and to recommend him to the
divine favour, that they might get safe to shore. 'Tis not that a wise
man may not live everywhere content, and be alone in the very crowd of a
palace; but if it be left to his own choice, the schoolman will tell you
that he should fly the very sight of the crowd: he will endure it if need
be; but if it be referred to him, he will choose to be alone. He cannot
think himself sufficiently rid of vice, if he must yet contend with it in
other men. Charondas punished those as evil men who were convicted of
keeping ill company. There is nothing so unsociable and sociable as man,
the one by his vice, the other by his nature. And Antisthenes, in my
opinion, did not give him a satisfactory answer, who reproached him with
frequenting ill company, by saying that the physicians lived well enough
amongst the sick, for if they