ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING 9 



men have many vacant hours, while they expect the tides and 

 returns of business ; and then the question is, how those spaces 

 of leisure shall be filled up, whether with pleasure or study? 

 Demosthenes being taunted by jEschines, a man of pleasure, 

 that his speeches smelt of the lamp, very pertly retorted, " There 

 is great difference between the objects which you and I pursue 

 by lamp-light."* No fear, therefore, that learning should dis- 

 place business, for it rather keeps and defends the mind against 

 idleness and pleasure, which might otherwise enter to the prej- 

 udice both of business and learning. 



5. For the allegation that learning should undermine the 

 reverence due to laws and government, it is a mere calumny, 

 without shadow of truth ; for to say that blind custom of obedi- 

 ence should be safer obligation than duty, taught and under- 

 stood, is to say that a blind man may tread surer by a guide 

 than a man with his eyes open can by a light. And, doubtless, 

 learning makes the mind gentle and pliable to government, 

 whereas ignorance renders it churlish and mutinous; and it is 

 always found that the most barbarous, rude, and ignorant times 

 have been most tumultuous, changeable, and seditious. 



6. As to the judgment of Cato the Censor, he was punished 

 for his contempt of learning, in the kind wherein he offended, 

 for when past threescore the humor took him to learn Greek, 

 which shows that his former censure of the Grecian learning 

 was rather an affected gravity than his inward sense.? And, in- 

 deed, the Romans never arrived at their height of empire till 

 they had arrived at their height of arts ; for in the time of the 

 two first Caesars, when their government was in its greatest per- 

 fection, there lived the best poet, Virgil ; the best historiogra- 

 pher, Livy; the best antiquary, Varro; and the best, or sec- 

 ond best orator, Cicero, that the world has known. And as to 

 the persecution of Socrates, the time must be remembered in 

 which it occurred, viz., under the reign of the Thirty Tyrants, 

 of all mortals the bloodiest and basest that ever reigned, since 

 the government had no sooner returned to its senses than that 

 judgment was reversed. Socrates, from being a criminal, 

 started at once into a hero, his memory loaded with honors 

 human and divine, and his discourses, which had been pre- 

 viously stigmatized as immoral and profane, were considered as 

 the reformers of thought and manners.* And let this suffice as 

 an answer to those politicians who have presumed, whether 

 sportively or in earnest, to disparage learning. 



