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THE SECOND BOOKE 441
us for our learning, not bookes that have sounder and
truer opinions, but volumes that speake the best
Greeke or Latine; and amongst her choice words hath
made the vainest humours of antiquitie to glide into
our conceits. A good institution changeth judgement
and manners, as it hapned to Polemon. This dissolute
young Grascian, going one day by chance to heare a
lecture of Xenocrates, where he not onely marked the
eloquence and sufficiencie of the reader, and brought
not home the knowledge of some notable thing, but a
more apparant and solide fruit, which was the sodaine
change and amendment of his former life. Who ever
heard such an effect of our discipline ?
faciatne quod olim
Mutatus Polemon, ponas insu/nia morbi,
Fasciolas, cubital, focaha ? potus ut tile
Dicitur ex collofurtbn carpsisse cotonas,
Postquam est impiansi coneptus voce magistn ?¹
Can you doe as did Polemon reformed,
Cast-off your sicknes signes, which you deformed,
Your bolsters, mufflers, bwathes? As he drinklinde,
His drunken garland covertly declinde,
By speech of fasting reader disciplinde ?
The least disdainefull condition of men, me thinkes,
is that which through simplicitie holds the last ranke,
and offereth us more regular commerce. The customes
and discourses of eountrie-clownish-men, I finde them
commonly to be more conformable and better disposed,
according to the true prescription of Philosophie, then
are those of our Philosophers. Plus sapit vulgus, quia
tantum, quantum opus est, sapit: ' The vulgar is the
wiser, because it is but as wise as it must needes.' The
worthiest men I have judged by eternall apparances
(for, to judge them after my fashion, they should be
sifted nearer) concerning war and military sufficiencie
have been, the Duke of Guise, that died before Orleans,
and the whilom Marshal Strozzi : For men extraordinarily
sufficient and endowed with no vulgar
vertue, Oliver and L'Hospitall, both great Chancelors
1 HOR. Ser. 1. ii. Sat. iii. 253.