OUS VOYAGE, OR PROTECTING PROVIDENCE, or A PRESERVATIVE AGAINST
DANGERS, and yet for all that endure storms, and are miserably shattered
and overturned.

Euripides's Iolaus of a feeble, superannuated old man, by means of a
certain prayer, became on a sudden youthful and strong for battle;
but the Stoics wise man was yesterday most detestable and the worst of
villains, but today is changed on a sudden into a state of virtue, and
is become of a wrinkled, pale fellow, and as Aeschylus speaks,

Of an old sickly wretch with stitch in 's back,
Distent with rending pains as on a rack,

a gallant, godlike, and beauteous person.

The goddess Minerva took from Ulysses his wrinkles, baldness, and
deformity, to make him appear a handsome man. But these men's wise man,
though old age quits not his body, but contrariwise still lays on
and heaps more upon it, though he remains (for instance) humpbacked,
toothless, one-eyed, is yet neither deformed, disfigured, nor
ill-favored. For as beetles are said to relinquish perfumes and to
pursue after ill scents; so Stoical love, having used itself to the most
foul and deformed persons, if by means of philosophy they change into
good form and comeliness, becomes presently disgusted.

He that in the Stoics' account was in the forenoon (for example) the
worst man in the world is in the afternoon the best of men; and he that
falls asleep a very sot, dunce, miscreant, and brute, nay, by Jove, a
slave and a beggar to boot, rises up the same day a prince, a rich and
a happy man, and (which is yet more) a continent, just, determined, and
unprepossessed person;--not by shooting forth out of a young and tender
body a downy beard or the sprouting tokens of mature youth, but by
having in a feeble, soft, unmanful, and undetermined mind, a perfect
intellect, a consummate prudence, a godlike disposition, an unprejudiced
science, and an unalterable habit. All this time his viciousness gives
not the least ground in order to it, but he becomes in an instant, I had
almost said, of the vilest brute, a sort of hero, genius, or god. For he
that receives his virtue from the Stoics portico may say,

Ask what thou wilt, it shall be granted thee.
(From Menander)

It brings wealth along with it, it contains kingship in it, it confers
fortune; it renders men prosperous, and makes them to want nothing and
to have a sufficiency of everything, though they have not one drachm of
silver in the hou