Not because Socrates has said so, but because it is in truth my own humour, and peradventure not without some excess, I look upon all men as my compatriots, and embrace a Polander as a Frenchman, preferring the universal and common tie to all national ties whatever.  I am not much taken with the sweetness of a native air:  acquaintance wholly new and wholly my own appear to me full as good as the other common and fortuitous ones with Four neighbours:  friendships that are purely of our own acquiring ordinarily carry it above those to which the communication of climate or of blood oblige us.  Nature has placed us in the world free and unbound; we imprison ourselves in certain straits, like the kings of Persia, who obliged themselves to drink no other water but that of the river Choaspes, foolishly quitted claim to their right in all other streams, and, so far as concerned themselves, dried up all the other rivers of the world.  What Socrates did towards his end, to look upon a sentence of banishment as worse than a sentence of death against him, I shall, I think, never be either so decrepid or so strictly habituated to my own country to be of that opinion.  These celestial lives have images enough that I embrace more by esteem than affection; and they have some also so elevated and extraordinary that I cannot embrace them so much as by esteem, forasmuch as I cannot conceive them.  That fancy was singular in a man who thought the whole world his city; it is true that he disdained travel, and had hardly ever set his foot out of the Attic territories.  What say you to his complaint of the money his friends offered to save his life, and that he refused to come out of prison by the mediation of others, in order not to disobey the laws in a time when they were otherwise so corrupt?  These examples are of the first kind for me; of the second, there are others that I could find out in the same person:  many of these rare examples surpass the force of my action, but some of them, moreover, surpass the force of my judgment.

Besides these reasons, travel is in my opinion a very profitable exercise; the soul is there continually employed in observing new and unknown things, and I do not know, as I have often said a better school wherein to model life than by incessantly exposing to it the diversity of so many other lives, fancies, and usances, and by making it relish a perpetual variety of forms of human nature.  The body is, therein, neither idle nor overwrought; and that moderate agitation puts it in breath.  I can keep on horseback, tormented with the stone as I am, without alighting or being weary, eight or ten hours together: 

“Vires ultra sorternque senectae.”

     ["Beyond the strength and lot of age.”—­AEneid, vi. 114.]