by collusion, contributed to it, seeing that, at the age of seventy years, he might fear to suffer the lofty motions of his mind to be cramped and his wonted lustre obscured.  What strange metamorphoses do I see age every day make in many of my acquaintance!  ’Tis a potent malady, and that naturally and imperceptibly steals into us; a vast provision of study and great precaution are required to evade the imperfections it loads us with, or at least to weaken their progress.  I find that, notwithstanding all my entrenchments, it gets foot by foot upon me:  I make the best resistance I can, but I do not know to what at last it will reduce me.  But fall out what will, I am content the world may know, when I am fallen, from what I fell.

CHAPTER III

OF THREE COMMERCES

We must not rivet ourselves so fast to our humours and complexions:  our chiefest sufficiency is to know how to apply ourselves to divers employments.  ’Tis to be, but not to live, to keep a man’s self tied and bound by necessity to one only course; those are the bravest souls that have in them the most variety and pliancy.  Of this here is an honourable testimony of the elder Cato: 

          “Huic versatile ingenium sic pariter ad omnia fuit,
          ut natum ad id unum diceres, quodcumque ageret.”

     ["His parts were so pliable to all uses, that one would say he had
     been born only to that which he was doing.”—­Livy, xxxix. 49.]

Had I liberty to set myself forth after my own mode, there is no so graceful fashion to which I would be so fixed as not to be able to disengage myself from it; life is an unequal, irregular and multiform motion.  ’Tis not to be a friend to one’s self, much less a master ’tis to be a slave, incessantly to be led by the nose by one’s self, and to be so fixed in one’s previous inclinations, that one cannot turn aside nor writhe one’s neck out of the collar.  I say this now in this part of my life, wherein I find I cannot easily disengage myself from the importunity of my soul, which cannot ordinarily amuse itself but in things of limited range, nor employ itself otherwise than entirely and with all its force; upon the lightest subject offered it expands and stretches it to that degree as therein to employ its utmost power; wherefore it is that idleness is to me a very painful labour, and very prejudicial to my health.  Most men’s minds require foreign matter to exercise and enliven them; mine has rather need of it to sit still and repose itself,

“Vitia otii negotio discutienda sunt,”

          ["The vices of sloth are to be shaken off by business.” 
          —­Seneca, Ep. 56.]

for its chiefest and hardest study is to study itself.  Books are to it a sort of employment that debauch it from its study.  Upon the first thoughts that possess it, it begins to bustle and make trial of its vigour in all directions, exercises its power of handling, now making trial of force, now fortifying, moderating, and ranging itself by the way of grace and order.  It has of its own wherewith to rouse its faculties:  nature has given to it, as to all others, matter enough of its own to make advantage of, and subjects proper enough where it may either invent or judge.