it a fault, if, as others do by other much less profitable sciences, I communicate what I have learned in this, though I am not very well pleased with my own progress.  There is no description so difficult, nor doubtless of so great utility, as that of a man’s self:  and withal, a man must curl his hair and set out and adjust himself, to appear in public:  now I am perpetually tricking myself out, for I am eternally upon my own description.  Custom has made all speaking of a man’s self vicious, and positively interdicts it, in hatred to the boasting that seems inseparable from the testimony men give of themselves: 

“In vitium ducit culpae fuga.”

     ["The avoiding a mere fault often leads us into a greater.” 
     Or:  “The escape from a fault leads into a vice”
     —­Horace, De Arte Poetics, verse 31.]

Instead of blowing the child’s nose, this is to take his nose off altogether.  I think the remedy worse than the disease.  But, allowing it to be true that it must of necessity be presumption to entertain people with discourses of one’s self, I ought not, pursuing my general design, to forbear an action that publishes this infirmity of mine, nor conceal the fault which I not only practise but profess.  Notwithstanding, to speak my thought freely, I think that the custom of condemning wine, because some people will be drunk, is itself to be condemned; a man cannot abuse anything but what is good in itself; and I believe that this rule has only regard to the popular vice.  They are bits for calves, with which neither the saints whom we hear speak so highly of themselves, nor the philosophers, nor the divines will be curbed; neither will I, who am as little the one as the other, If they do not write of it expressly, at all events, when the occasions arise, they don’t hesitate to put themselves on the public highway.  Of what does Socrates treat more largely than of himself?  To what does he more direct and address the discourses of his disciples, than to speak of themselves, not of the lesson in their book, but of the essence and motion of their souls?  We confess ourselves religiously to God and our confessor; as our neighbours, do to all the people.  But some will answer that we there speak nothing but accusation against ourselves; why then, we say all; for our very virtue itself is faulty and penetrable.  My trade and art is to live; he that forbids me to speak according to my own sense, experience, and practice, may as well enjoin an architect not to speak of building according to his own knowledge, but according to that of his neighbour; according to the knowledge of another, and not according to his own.  If it be vainglory for a man to publish his own virtues, why does not Cicero prefer the eloquence of Hortensius, and Hortensius that of Cicero?  Peradventure they mean that I should give testimony of myself by works and effects, not barely by words.  I chiefly paint my thoughts, a subject void of form and incapable of operative