ECCENTRICITIES. 81 



a shaven head. His beard was yellow and forked. His 

 gait was clumsy, for he paid little or no heed in walking 

 to the way that lay before him, and his pace and bearing 

 varied with his thoughts. It was now fast, now slow, 

 now upright, now with bowed head, as variable as the 

 gestures of a child. In his speech he was too copious and 

 too deficient in amenity 1 . He was very fond of fishing 2 . 

 He had a taste for cats and dogs and little birds, so that 

 he even names them with history, music, and other things 

 that adorn this transitory scene, placing them in his list 

 between liberty and temperance on the one side, and on the 

 other side the consolation of death, and the equal ebb of 

 time over the happy and the wretched 3 . Among his 

 follies he numbers an inability to part with living things 

 that have been established once under his roof. " I re- 

 tain," he says, " domestics that are not only useless to me, 

 but that I am told also are a scandal to my house; I keep 

 even animals which I have once accepted, goats, lambs, 

 hares, rabbits, storks, so that they pollute me the whole 

 house 4 ." 



A more natural taste in a philosopher, an extravagant 



1 De Vita Propr. p. 59. 2 Ibid. p. 80. 



3 He speaks of quicquam boni quo adornes hanc scenam, and gives 

 for example " musicaB auditus, oculorum lustratio, sermones, fabulae, 

 historiae, libertas, continentia, aviculae, catuli, feles, consolatio mortis, 

 communis temporis transitus miseris cequalis ac beatis, casuum et fortunes" 

 De Propria Vita Lib. cap. xxx. 



4 De Propria Vita Lib. cap. xiii. pp. 60, 61. 



VOL. I. G 



