50 ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING 



in point of education. This excellent part of ancient dis 

 cipline, has in some measure been revived of late by the 

 colleges of Jesuits abroad; in regard of whose diligence in 

 fashioning the morals and cultivating the minds of youth, 

 I may say, as Agesilaus said to his enemy Pharnabasus, 

 &quot;Talis quum sis, utinam noster esses.&quot; 33 



2. The manners of learned men belong rather to their 

 individual persons than to their studies or pursuits. No 

 doubt, as in all other professions and conditions of life, 

 bad and good are to be found among them; yet it must 

 be admitted that learning and studies, unless they fall in 

 with very depraved dispositions, have, in conformity with 

 the adage, &quot;Abire studia in mores,&quot; a moral influence upon 

 men s lives. For my part I cannot find that any disgrace 

 to learning can proceed from the habits of learned men, in 

 herent in them as learned, unless peradventure that may be 

 a fault which was attributed to Demosthenes, Cicero, the 

 second Cato, and many others, that seeing the times they 

 read of more pure than their own, pushed their servility 

 too far in the reformation of manners, and to seek to im 

 pose, by austere precepts, the laws of ancient asceticism 

 upon dissolute times. Yet even antiquity should have 

 forewarned them of this excess; for Solon, upon being 

 asked if he had given his citizens the best laws, replied, 

 4 The best they were capable of receiving.&quot; 84 And Plato, 

 finding that he had fallen upon corrupt times, refused to 

 take part in the administration of the commonwealth, say 

 ing that a man should treat his country with the same for 

 bearance as his parents, and recall her from a wrong course, 

 not by violence or contest, but by entreaty and persuasion. 36 

 Caesar s counsellor administers the same caveat in the&quot; words, 

 &quot;Non ad vetera instituta revocamus quae jampridem corruptis 

 moribus ludibrio sunt. 38 Cicero points out the same error 

 in the second Cato, when writing to his friend Atticus: 



83 Plut. &quot;Life of Agesil. &quot; M Plutarch, Solon. 



35 Epist. Z. iii. 331 ; and cf. Ep. T. iii. 316. 



36 Sallust, Cat. Conspiracy. 



