Produced by David Widger
Translated by Charles Cotton
Edited by William Carew Hazilitt
1877
I. Of the inconstancy of our actions.
II. Of drunkenness.
III. A custom of the Isle of Cea.
IV. To-morrow's a new day.
V. Of conscience.
VI. Use makes perfect.
Such as make it their business to oversee human actions, do not findthemselves in anything so much perplexed as to reconcile them and bringthem into the world's eye with the same lustre and reputation; for theycommonly so strangely contradict one another that it seems impossiblethey should proceed from one and the same person. We find the youngerMarius one while a son of Mars and another a son of Venus. Pope BonifaceVIII. entered, it is said, into his Papacy like a fox, behaved himself init like a lion, and died like a dog; and who could believe it to be thesame Nero, the perfect image of all cruelty, who, having the sentence ofa condemned man brought to him to sign, as was the custom, cried out,"O that I had never been taught to write!" so much it went to his heartto condemn a man to death. All story is full of such examples, and everyman is able to produce so many to himself, or out of his own practice orobservation, that I sometimes wonder to see men of understanding givethemselves the trouble of sorting these pieces, considering thatirresolution appears to me to be the most common and manifest vice of ournature witness the famous verse of the player Publius:
"Malum consilium est, quod mutari non potest."
["'Tis evil counsel that will admit no change."
—Pub. Mim., ex Aul. Gell., xvii. 14.]
There seems some reason in forming a judgment of a man from the mostusual methods of his life; but, considering the natural instability ofour manners and opinions, I have often thought even the best authors alittle out in so obstinately endeavouring to make of us any constant andsolid contexture; they choose a general air of a man, and according tothat interpret all his actions, of which, if they cannot bend some to auniformity with the rest, they are presently imputed to dissimulation.Augustus has escaped them, for there was in him so apparent, sudden, andcontinual variety of actions all the whole course of his life, that hehas slipped away clear and undecided from the most daring critics. I canmore hardly believe a man's constancy than any other virtue, and believenothing sooner than the contrary. He that would judge of a man in detailand distinctly, bit by bit, would oftener be able to speak the truth. Itis a hard matter, from all antiquity, to pick out a dozen men who haveformed their lives to one certain and constant course, which is theprincipal design of wisdom; for to comprise it all in one word, says oneof the ancients, and to contract all the rules of human life into one,"it is to will, and not to will, always one and the same thing: I willnot vouchsafe," says he, "to add, provided the will be just, for if it benot just, it is impossible it should be always one." I have indeedformerly learned that vice is nothing but irregularity, and want ofmeasure, and therefore 'tis impossible to fix constancy to it. 'Tis asaying of. Demosthenes, "that the beginning oh all virtue isconsultation and deliberation; the end and perfection, constancy."