“Rari quippe boni:  numero vix sunt totidem quot
               Thebarum portae, vel divitis ostia Nili,”

["Good men forsooth are scarce:  there are hardly as many as there
are gates of Thebes or mouths of the rich Nile.” 
—­Juvenal, Sat., xiii. 26.]

the contagion is very dangerous in the crowd.  A man must either imitate the vicious or hate them both are dangerous things, either to resemble them because they are many or to hate many because they are unresembling to ourselves.  Merchants who go to sea are in the right when they are cautious that those who embark with them in the same bottom be neither dissolute blasphemers nor vicious other ways, looking upon such society as unfortunate.  And therefore it was that Bias pleasantly said to some, who being with him in a dangerous storm implored the assistance of the gods:  “Peace, speak softly,” said he, “that they may not know you are here in my company.”—­[Diogenes Laertius]—­And of more pressing example, Albuquerque, viceroy in the Indies for Emmanuel, king of Portugal, in an extreme peril of shipwreck, took a young boy upon his shoulders, for this only end that, in the society of their common danger his innocence might serve to protect him, and to recommend him to the divine favour, that they might get safe to shore.  ’Tis not that a wise man may not live everywhere content, and be alone in the very crowd of a palace; but if it be left to his own choice, the schoolman will tell you that he should fly the very sight of the crowd:  he will endure it if need be; but if it be referred to him, he will choose to be alone.  He cannot think himself sufficiently rid of vice, if he must yet contend with it in other men.  Charondas punished those as evil men who were convicted of keeping ill company.  There is nothing so unsociable and sociable as man, the one by his vice, the other by his nature.  And Antisthenes, in my opinion, did not give him a satisfactory answer, who reproached him with frequenting ill company, by saying that the physicians lived well enough amongst the sick, for if they contribute to the health of the sick, no doubt but by the contagion, continual sight of, and familiarity with diseases, they must of necessity impair their own.

Now the end, I take it, is all one, to live at more leisure and at one’s ease:  but men do not always take the right way.  They often think they have totally taken leave of all business, when they have only exchanged one employment for another:  there is little less trouble in governing a private family than a whole kingdom.  Wherever the mind is perplexed, it is in an entire disorder, and domestic employments are not less troublesome for being less important.  Moreover, for having shaken off the court and the exchange, we have not taken leave of the principal vexations of life: 

              “Ratio et prudentia curas,
               Non locus effusi late maris arbiter, aufert;”