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CHAP II.] PRUDENCE IN BUSINESS. 299 



man*a private fortune, and may therefore serre eacli person 

 as a private register of his affairs. 



No one hath hitherto treated the doctrine of business 

 suitably to its merit, to the great prejudice oi the character 

 both of learning and learned men ; for from hence proceeds 

 the mischief, which has fixed it as a reproach upon men of 

 letters, that learning and civil prudence are seldom found 

 together. And if we rightly observe those three kinds of 

 prudence, which we lately said belong to civil life, that ot 

 conversation is generally despised by men of learning as a 

 servile thing and an enemy to contemplation ; and for the 

 government of states, though learned men acquit themselves 

 well when advanced to the helm, yet this promotion happens 

 to few of them ; but for the present subject, the prudence 

 of business, upon which our lives principally turn, there are 

 no books extant about it, except a few civil admonitions, 

 collected into a little volume or two, by no means adequate 

 to the copiousness of the subject. But if books were written 

 upon this subject as upon others, we doubt not that learned 

 men, furnished with tolerable experience, would far excel the 

 unlearned, famished with much greater experience, and out- 

 shoot them in their own bow. 



Nor need we apprehend that the matter of this science is 

 too various to fall under precept, for it is much less extensive 

 than the doctrine of government, which yet we find very 

 well cultivated. There seem to have been some professors 

 of this kind of prudence among the Romans in their best 

 days ; for Cicero declares it was the custom, a little before 

 his time, among the senators most famous for knowledge and 

 experience, as Coruncanius, Curius, Lselius, &c., to walk the 

 forum at certain hours, where they ofiered themselves to be 

 consulted by the people, not so much upon law, but upon 

 business of all kinds ; as the marriage of a daughter, the 

 education of a son, the purchasing of an estate, and other 

 occasions of common life.*^ Whence it appears, that there is 

 a certain prudence of advising even in private affairs, and 

 derivable from an universal knowledge of civil business, 

 experience, and general observation of similar cases. So we 

 find the book which Q. Cicero wrote to his brother, Da 

 l*etitiPB© Cpftsulatus (the only treatise, so far as w§ kttOW, 

 » Orat, § iii, ^, 



