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"If you have acquired," Plutarch says, command over your passions, and are become wise and virtuous, you will be pleased with wealth, for enabling you to be useful to many; with poverty, for not having much to care for; with fame, for procuring you honour; and with obscurity, for keeping you from being envied."

Verecundia inutilis Viro egenti.

Bashfulness is of no use to a man in want. The adage teaches that persons liberally educated but in mean circumstances, should not refuse to undertake offices, though beneath them, which might be executed without offending against any moral or religious duty. This many do, not from their objection to the labour, but from being ashamed to appear 'to their friends, or to the world in a degraded situation; they can contemn pleasure, and bear pain or grief with firmness, but reproach and obloquy breaks and overwhelms them.. It is the disgrace more than the confinement that makes a prison hateful. When Johnson

found a pair of shoes placed at his door by one of his fellow students, actuated by false shame or by pride, he threw them, with great indignation, out of the window; though his own were so much worn as not to keep his feet from the stones. But bashfulness or false modesty is more than useless also, when it deters men from laying open their circumstances to their friends, who both might and would, by their advice or otherwise, relieve them, until, by delay, they are become so involved that nothing can prevent their fall: or when it leads them to conceal their bodily complaints, which not unfrequently happens, from the physician or surgeon, until they no longer admit of being cured.

Sustine et abstine.

Bear and forbear, a phrase frequently used by Epictetus, as embracing almost the whole that philosophy or human reason can teach us. Of this Epictetus was a memorable example, no man bearing the evils of life with more constancy or less coveting its enjoyments.

His

His master Epaphroditus, for he was a slave in the early part of his life, diverting himself with striking his leg with a large stick, he told him, that if he continued to give such heavy strokes he would break the bone; which happening as he had foretold, all that he said on the occasion was, " did not I tell you, you would break my leg." When afterwards he had obtained his liberty and was much followed as a teacher of philosophy, he still lived in the plainest and simplest manner; his house or cottage had no door, and the little furniture it contained was of the meanest kind. When an iron lamp by which he used to study, was stolen, he said, "I shall deceive the thief if he should come again, as he will only find an earthen one." This earthen lamp, Lucian tells us, was sold for three thousand drachmas or groats, £75 of our money. He is said to have lived to his ninety-sixth year. The Mexicans, without being beholden to the tenets of philosophy, have learnt from experience the necessity of undergoing trouble; they say to their children on being born, "thou art come into

the world, child, to endure; suffer, therefore,

and be silent.

Naturam expellas Furca tamen usque

recurret.

As

Which may be aptly enough rendered by our English proverb, "what is bred in the bone, will never get out of the flesh.". "Lupus pilum mutat, non mentem," it is easier for the wolf to change his coat than his disposition habits are with difficulty changed, and with greater difficulty if of such long continuance as to become a second nature. the bough of a tree drawn from its natural course, recoils and returns to its old position as soon as the force by which it had been restrained is removed; so do we return to old habits as soon as the motives, whether interest or fear, which had induced us to quit them, are done away: the cat that had been transformed into a fine lady, on seeing a mouse, forgetting the decorum required by her new form, sprung from the table where she was sitting to seize on her prey. "Vizio di natura dura fino alla

sepol

sepoltura," the vice that is born with us or is become natural to us, accompanies us to the grave. A rich miser being at the point of death, his confessor placed before him a large silver crucifix, and was about to begin an exhortation, when the usurer, fixing his eyes on the crucifix, said, "I cannot, sir, lend you much upon this."

Camelus saltat. :

See the camel is dancing, may be said, when we see a very austere person laughing, or any one doing what is contrary to his usual habit or disposition.

Optimum Condimentum Fames.

Appetito non vuol salza," "hunger is the best sauce." This apothegm was frequently in the mouth of Socrates deriding his voluptuous countrymen, whose tables were furnished with every species of luxury, and who used a variety of provocatives to stir up an appetite, which might be so much better ext cited, he told them, at so easy a rate.