ourselves the lie, to excuse the lie we have given to another.  You are not to consider if your word or action may admit of another interpretation; ’tis your own true and sincere interpretation, your real meaning in what you said or did, that you are thenceforward to maintain, whatever it cost you.  Men speak to your virtue and conscience, which are not things to be put under a mask; let us leave these pitiful ways and expedients to the jugglers of the law.  The excuses and reparations that I see every day made and given to repair indiscretion, seem to me more scandalous than the indiscretion itself.  It were better to affront your adversary a second time than to offend yourself by giving him so unmanly a satisfaction.  You have braved him in your heat and anger, and you would flatter and appease him in your cooler and better sense; and by that means lay yourself lower and at his feet, whom before you pretended to overtop.  I do not find anything a gentleman can say so vicious in him as unsaying what he has said is infamous, when to unsay it is authoritatively extracted from him; forasmuch as obstinacy is more excusable in a man of honour than pusillanimity.  Passions are as easy for me to evade, as they are hard for me to moderate: 

          “Exscinduntur facilius ammo, quam temperantur.”

     ["They are more easily to be eradicated than governed.”]

He who cannot attain the noble Stoical impassibility, let him secure himself in the bosom of this popular stolidity of mine; what they performed by virtue, I inure myself to do by temperament.  The middle region harbours storms and tempests; the two extremes, of philosophers and peasants, concur in tranquillity and happiness: 

               “Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,
               Atque metus omnes et inexorabile fatum
               Subjecit pedibus, strepitumque Acherontis avari! 
               Fortunatus et ille, Deos qui novit agrestes,
               Panaque, Sylvanumque senem, Nymphasque sorores!”

["Happy is he who could discover the causes of things, and place under his feet all fears and inexorable fate, and the sound of rapacious Acheron:  he is blest who knows the country gods, and Pan, and old Sylvanus, and the sister nymphs.”—­Virgil, Georg., ii. 490.]

The births of all things are weak and tender; and therefore we should have our eyes intent on beginnings; for as when, in its infancy, the danger is not perceived, so when it is grown up, the remedy is as little to be found.  I had every day encountered a million of crosses, harder to digest in the progress of ambition, than it has been hard for me to curb the natural propension that inclined me to it: 

                    “Jure perhorrui
                    Lath conspicuum tollere verticem.”

          ["I ever justly feared to raise my head too high.” 
          —­Horace, Od.,iii. 16, 18.]