

ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING n 



fact that men are more careful what they put into new vessels 

 than into those already seasoned. It is manifest that things in 

 their weakest state usually demand our best attention and as- 

 sistance. Hearken to the Hebrew rabbins : " Your young men 

 shall see visions, your old men shall dream dreams ;"* upon 

 which the commentators observe, that youth is the worthier age, 

 inasmuch as revelation by vision is clearer than by dreams. And 

 to say the truth, how much soever the lives of the pedants have 

 been ridiculed upon the stage, as the emblem of tyranny, because 

 the modern looseness or negligence has not duly regarded the 

 choice of proper schoolmasters and tutors ; yet the wisdom of 

 the ancientest and best times always complained that states were 

 too busy with laws and too remiss in point of education. This 

 excellent part of ancient discipline 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, " Talis quum sis, utinam noster esses."' 



2. The manners of learned men belong rather to their in- 

 dividual 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 dis- 

 positions, have, in conformity with the adage, " Abire studia 

 in mores," 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, inherent in them as learned, unless per- 

 adventure that may be a fault which was attributed to Demos- 

 thenes, Cicero, the second Cato, and many others, that see- 

 ing the times they read of more pure than their own, pushed 

 their servility too far in the reformation of manners, and to 

 seek to impose, by austere precepts, the laws of ancient asceti- 

 cism upon dissolute times. Yet even antiquity should have fore- 

 warned them of this excess ; for Solon, upon being asked if he 

 had given his citizens the best laws, replied, " The best they 

 were capable of receiving. " And Plato, finding that he had 

 fallen upon corrupt times, refused to take part in the adminis- 

 tration of the commonwealth, saying that a man should treat 

 his country with the same forbearance as his parents, and re- 

 call her from a wrong course, not by violence or contest, but by 

 entreaty and persuasion.* Caesar's counsellor administers the 



