on. We are great
fools. "He has passed his life in idleness," say we: "I have done
nothing to-day." What? have you not lived? that is not only the
fundamental, but the most illustrious, of your occupations. "Had I been
put to the management of great affairs, I should have made it seen what I
could do." "Have you known how to meditate and manage your life? you
have performed the greatest work of all." In order to shew and develop
herself, nature needs only fortune; she equally manifests herself in all
stages, and behind a curtain as well as without one. Have you known how
to regulate your conduct, you have done a great deal more than he who has
composed books. Have you known how to take repose, you have done more
than he who has taken empires and cities.

The glorious masterpiece of man is to live to purpose; all other things:
to reign, to lay up treasure, to build, are but little appendices and
props. I take pleasure in seeing a general of an army, at the foot of a
breach he is presently to assault, give himself up entire and free at
dinner, to talk and be merry with his friends. And Brutus, when heaven
and earth were conspired against him and the Roman liberty, stealing some
hour of the night from his rounds to read and scan Polybius in all
security. 'Tis for little souls, buried under the weight of affairs, not
from them to know how clearly to disengage themselves, not to know how to
lay them aside and take them up again:

"O fortes, pejoraque passi
Mecum saepe viri! nunc vino pellite curas
Cras ingens iterabimus aequor."

["O brave spirits, who have often suffered sorrow with me, drink
cares away; tomorrow we will embark once more on the vast sea."
--Horace, Od., i. 7, 30.]

Whether it be in jest or earnest, that the theological and Sorbonnical
wine, and their feasts, are turned into a proverb, I find it reasonable
they should dine so much more commodiously and pleasantly, as they have
profitably and seriously employed the morning in the exercise of their
schools. The conscience of having well spent the other hours, is the
just and savoury sauce of the dinner-table. The sages lived after that
manner; and that inimitable emulation to virtue, which astonishes us both
in the one and the other Cato, that humour of theirs, so severe as even
to be importunate, gently submits itself and yields to the laws of the
human condition, of