contribute to the health of the sick, no
doubt but by the contagion, continual sight of, and familiarity with
diseases, they must of necessity impair their own.

Now the end, I take it, is all one, to live at more leisure and at one's
ease: but men do not always take the right way. They often think they
have totally taken leave of all business, when they have only exchanged
one employment for another: there is little less trouble in governing a
private family than a whole kingdom. Wherever the mind is perplexed, it
is in an entire disorder, and domestic employments are not less
troublesome for being less important. Moreover, for having shaken off
the court and the exchange, we have not taken leave of the principal
vexations of life:

"Ratio et prudentia curas,
Non locus effusi late maris arbiter, aufert;"

["Reason and prudence, not a place with a commanding view of the
great ocean, banish care."--Horace, Ep., i. 2.]

ambition, avarice, irresolution, fear, and inordinate desires, do not
leave us because we forsake our native country:

"Et
Post equitem sedet atra cura;"

["Black care sits behind the horse man."
--Horace, Od., iii. 1, 40].

they often follow us even to cloisters and philosophical schools; nor
deserts, nor caves, hair-shirts, nor fasts, can disengage us from them:

"Haeret lateri lethalis arundo."

["The fatal shaft adheres to the side."--AEneid, iv. 73.]

One telling Socrates that such a one was nothing improved by his travels:
"I very well believe it," said he, "for he took himself along with him"

"Quid terras alio calentes
Sole mutamus? patriae quis exsul
Se quoque fugit?"

["Why do we seek climates warmed by another sun? Who is the man
that by fleeing from his country, can also flee from himself?"
--Horace, Od., ii. 16, 18.]

If a man do not first discharge both himself and his mind of the burden
with which he finds himself oppressed, motion will but make it press the
harder and sit the heavier, as the lading of a ship is of less
encumbrance when fast and bestowed in a settled posture. You do a sick
man more harm than good in removing him from place to place; you fix and
establish the disease by motion, as stakes sink deeper and more firmly
into the