nature would be eclipsed by reading books, and would hinder them from learning more in the company they might keep than they can obtain from other, and that the other method makes them men much sooner and upon this ground, which hath gotten too much countenance in the world, the universities and inns of court which have been the seminaries out of which our ancestors have grown to be able to serve their country with great reputation and success, are now declined as places which keep hopeful youth too long boys, and infect them with formalities and impertinent knowledge, of which they shall have little use, and send them out late and less prepared for and inclined to those generous qualifications, which are most like to raise their fortunes and their reputations. Which sure is a very great error, and hath been the source from whence many mischiefs have flowed. And to speak first of this extolled breeding in good company and travel into foreign parts before they know any thing of their own country; and getting the vice and the language of that, before they can secure themselves from the one, or understand their own native tongue; we have the knowledge and experience of many who have, indeed, the confidence and presumption of men, but retain the levity and folly of children and if they are able to disguise those weaknesses, and appear in their behaviour and discourse earlier men than others of their age seem to be (as it many times falls out, especially in men endowed with any principles of modesty,) yet those very early men decay apace, for want of nourishment at the roots, and we too frequently see those who seem men at twenty years of age, when the gaiety of their youth decays, and themselves grow weary of those exercises and vanities which then became them, become boys at thirty; having no supply of parts for business, or grave and sober conversation, they then grow out of love with themselves, and too soon lament those defects and impotency in themselves, which nothing but some degree of learning and acquaintance with books could have prevented. And to say that they can fall to it afterwards, and recover the time they have lost when they will, is no more reasonable (though there have been some very rare

examples of such industry) than to imagine that a man, after he is forty years of age, may learn to dance as well as if he had begun it sooner. He who loves not books before he comes to thirty years of age, will hardly love them enough afterwards to understand them. The conversation with wise and good men cannot be overvalued, it forms the mind and understanding for noble and heroical undertakings, and is much to be preferred before the mere learning of books, in order to be wise; but where a good foundation of the knowledge and understanding of books is first laid, to support the excellent superstructure of such conversation, the advance must be made much more advantageously, than when nothing but the ordinary endowments of nature are brought to be cultivated by conversation; which is commonly chosen with men of the same talents, who gratify one another with believing that they want not any extraordinary improvement, and so join together in censuring and condemning what they do not understand, and think that men have only better fortune than they who have got credit without being in any degree wiser than themselves.

It is very true, there have been very extraordinary men in all nations, who, by their great experience, and a notable vivacity of spirit, have not only attained to eminent promotion, but have been exceedingly worthy of it; albeit they have been upon the matter illiterate, as to the learning of books and the learned languages; but then they have been eminently industrious, who, having had the good fortune to be educated in constant labour, under wise and experienced men, have, by indefatigable pains and observation, gotten the learning of business without the learning of books, and cannot properly be accounted illiterate, though they know little Latin or Greek. We speak of books and learning, not of the language in which they are writ. The French and the Italian and the Spanish have many excellent books of all kinds; and they who are well versed in those languages, may be very learned, though they know no others: and the truth is, the French, whether by the fertility of their language, or the happy industry of many excellent persons, have translated most good authors both of the

Greek and Latin, with that admirable facility that little of the spirit and vigour even of the style of the best writers is diminished; an advantage the English industry and curiosity hath not yet brought home to that nation: they who have performed that office hitherto, for the most part, having done it for profit, and to live, without any delight in the pains they take; and though they may have had some competent knowledge of the language out of which they have translated, have been very far from understanding their own mother-tongue, and being versed in the fruitful productions of the English language. But though learning may be thus attained by many nations in their own proper dialect, and the language of their own country, yet few men who take the pains to search for it in their own, but have the curiosity to look into the original, and are conversant in those which are still, and still will be, called the learned languages; nor is yet any man eminent for knowledge and learning that was not conversant in other tongues besides his own; and it may be, those two necessary sciences, that is, the principles of them, grammar and logic, can very hardly be so well and conveniently taught and understood as by Latin. It shall serve my turn, and I shall willingly comply with and gratify our beloved modern education, if they take the pains to read good books in that language they understand best and like most; I had almost said, if they will read any books, be so much alone as reading employs; if they will take as much pains to be wise and polish their minds, as they do to order and dispose their clothes and their hair; if they will put that constraint upon themselves in order to be learned, as they do to attain to a perfection in any bodily exercise; and, lastly, which is worth all the rest, if they will as heartily endeavour to please God, as they do those for whom they have no great affection, every great man whose favour they solicit, and affect being good Christians as much as they do to be fine gentlemen, they shall find their labour as much less, as their reward and recompense will be greater. If they will not do this, they must not take it ill if it be believed that they are without knowledge that their souls are to outlive their bodies; and that

they do not so much wish to go to Heaven, as to get the next bet at play, or to win the next horse-race they are to run.

To conclude: If books and industry will not contribute to their being wise, and to their salvation, they will receive from it (which they value more) pleasure and refreshment in this world; they will have less melancholy in the distress of their fortune, less anxiety in the mortification of sickness; they will not so much complain for want of company, when all their companions forsake them; their age will be less grievous unto them; and God may so bless it, without any intention of their own, that such thoughts may insensibly insinuate themselves into them, that they may go out of the world with less dismal apprehensions, and conclude their neglected lives with more tranquillity of spirit, at least not be so much terrified with the approach of death, as men who have never entertained any sober thoughts of life have used to be, and naturally must be.

XII.

SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE.

(1628-1699.)

ESSAY UPON THE ANCIENT AND MODERN LEARNING.

[Written before 1688.]

THUS much I thought might be allowed me to say, for the giving some idea of what those sages or learned men were, or may have been, who were ancients to those that are ancients to us. Now to observe what these have been, is more easy and obvious. The most ancient Grecians that we are at all acquainted with, after Lycurgus, who was certainly a great philosopher as well as lawgiver, were the seven sages: though the Court of Croesus is said to have been much resorted to by the sophists of Greece in the happy beginnings of his reign. And some of these seven seem to have brought most of the sciences out of Egypt and Phoenica into Greece; particularly those of astronomy, astrology, geometry, and arithmetic. These were soon followed by Pythagoras (who seems to have introduced natural and moral philosophy) and by several of his followers, both in Greece and Italy. But of all these there remains nothing in writing now among us; so that Hippocrates, Plato, and Xenophon, are the first philosophers whose works have escaped the injuries of time. But that we may not conclude the first writers we have of the Grecians were the first learned or wise among them; we shall find upon enquiry that the more ancient sages of Greece appear, by the characters remaining of them, to have been much the greater men. They were generally princes or lawgivers of their countries, or at least offered and invited to be so, either of their own or of others, that