TO GIANBATISTA FROM HIS FATHER. 193 



at past deeds, or present fortune : for all the ills that now 

 hang over you, your poverty, your wife, your ill-repute, 

 your absence from your father's house, all these I say you 

 have prepared for yourself willingly and knowingly. 

 Wherefore, bad as they are, you must not bemoan them. 

 Of what belongs to fortune you have nothing to bemoan : 

 your nature is human, not brutish ; you are a man, not a 

 woman ; a Christian, not a Mahometan or Jew ; an 

 Italian, not a barbarian; sprung of a renowned city and 

 family, and if that be anything to the purpose of a 

 father through whose work (if you do not go utterly to 

 ruin) your name will endure for many ages: do you 

 think fortune has been hard to you in these matters? 

 You have only to bear with infirm health and a weak 

 body ; one was your hereditary right, the other (if you 

 were prudent, and abstained from excessive pleasures) 

 you could meet and remedy. Reflect upon this, that 

 through your errors God punishes me, arid through mine 

 you ; for you could not have gone astray except with His 

 permission. For the mind that is within us comes from 

 God, and that, too, momently. And things which seem 

 to be calamities, if you could look a little forward into 

 coming events, you might understand to be vain things, 

 such, too, our seeming pleasures would be found. While, 

 therefore, congratulations over happiness are the business 

 of a man ignorant of human nature : still less does a man 



VOL II. O 



