ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING 211 



such subjects and methods of treating them, as may rather 

 show their own capacities, than be of use to the reader. Sen- 

 eca says excellently, " Eloquence is hurtful to those it inspires 

 with a desire of itself, and not of things " \c for writings should 

 make men in love with the subject, and not with the writer. 

 They, therefore, take the just course who can say of their coun- 

 sels as Demosthenes did " If you put these things in execu- 

 tion, you shall not only praise the orator for the present, but 

 yourselves also soon after, when your affairs are in a better pos- 

 ture."<* As for myself, excellent King, to speak the truth, I 

 have frequently neglected the glory of my order, name, and 

 learning, both in the works I now publish and those which I 

 have already designed to execute, in following out my direct 

 purpose of advancing the happiness of mankind ; so that I may 

 fairly say, though marked out by nature to be the architect of 

 philosophy and the sciences, I have submitted to become a 

 common workman and laborer, there being many mean things 

 necessary to the erection of the structure, which others, out of 

 a natural disdain, refused to attend to. But in ethics the phi- 

 losophers have culled out a certain splendid mass of matter, 

 wherein they might principally show their force of genius or 

 power of eloquence ; but for other things that chiefly conduce 

 to practice, as they could not be so gracefully set off, they have 

 entirely neglected them. Yet so many eminent men, surely, 

 ought not to have despaired of a like success with Virgil, who 

 procured as much glory for eloquence, ingenuity, and learning, 

 by explaining the homely observations of agriculture as in re- 

 lating the heroic acts of 



" Ncc sum animi dubius, verbis ea vincere magnum 

 Quam sit, et angustis hunc addere rebus honorem." Virgil.* 



And certainly, if men were bent, not upon writing at leisure 

 what may be read at leisure, but really to cultivate and improve 

 active life, the georgics of the mind ought to be as highly 

 valued as those heroical portraits of virtue, goodness, and hap- 

 piness wherein so much pains have been taken. 



We divide ethics into two principal doctrines the one of the 

 model or image of good, the other of the regulation and culture 

 of the mind, which I commonly express by the word georgics. 

 The first describes the nature of good, and the other prescribes 

 rules for conforming the mind to it. The doctrine of the image 



