r, the best;
While the deep furrows of his noble mind
Harvests of wise and prudent counsel bear.
(See note in the same passage of
Aeschylus (Sept. 591), i. 210. (G).)

For it is the part of a wise man to value himself upon the consciousness
of his own true worth and excellency.

Whereas, therefore, all inward perfections are reducible to wisdom, it
appears that all sorts of virtue and learning are included in it

Again, boys may be instructed, by reading the poets as they ought, to
draw even from those passages that are most suspected as wicked and
absurd something that is useful and profitable; as the bee is taught by
Nature to gather the sweetest and most pleasant honey from the harshest
flowers and sharpest thorns. It does indeed at the first blush cast a
shrewd suspicion on Agmemnon of taking a bribe, when Homer tells us that
he discharged that rich man from the wars who presented him with his
fleet mare Aethe:--

Whom rich Echepolus, more rich than brave,
To 'scape the wars, to Agamemnon gave
(Aethe her name), at home to end his days;
Base wealth preferring to eternal praise.
("Iliad," xxiii. 297.)

Yet, as saith Aristotle, it was well done of him to prefer a good beast
before such a man. For, the truth is, a dog or ass is of more value than
a timorous and cowardly man that wallows in wealth and luxury. Again,
Thetis seems to do indecently, when she exhorts her son to follow his
pleasures and minds him of companying with women. But even here, on the
other side, the continency of Achilles is worthy to be considered; who,
though he dearly loved Briseis,--newly returned to him too,--yet, when
he knew his life to be near its end, does not hasten to the fruition
of pleasures, nor, when he mourns for his friend Patroclus, does he (as
most men are wont) shut himself up from all business and neglect his
duty, but only bars himself from recreations for his sorrow's sake,
while yet he gives himself up to action and military employments.
And Archilochus is not praiseworthy either, who, in the midst of his
mourning for his sister's husband drowned in the sea, contrives to
dispel his grief by drinking and merriment. And yet he gives this
plausible reason to justify that practice of his,

To drink and dance, rather than mourn, I choose;
Nor wrong I him, whom mourning can't reduce.

For, if he judged himself to do nothing amiss when he followed sports
and banquets,