ledge and makes no use of it. The chief precept of Plato, in his Republic,[1] is to assign to its citizens their offices according to their natures. Nature can do and does every thing. The lame are ill adapted to bodily exercises, and lame minds to mental exercises; degenerate and common minds are unworthy of philosophy. When we see a man ill shod, we say it is no wonder, if he is a shoemaker; in like manner it seems to me that experience often shows to us a physician worse physicked, a divine less amended, a scholar less able, than any other. Aristo Chius had in old times grounds for saying that philosophers were harmful to their listeners, inasmuch as the greater number of minds are not adapted to profit by such instruction, which, if it does not lead to good, leads to evil: asotos ex Aristippi, acerbos ex Zenonis schola exire.[2]
(a) In that excellent system of education which Xenophon attributes to the Persians,[3] we find that they taught virtue to their children as other nations teach letters. (c) Plato says[4] that, in their royal family, the oldest son was brought up thus: after birth he was given over, not to women, but to those eunuchs who had the highest reputation in the king’s household because of their virtue. They assumed the duty of making his body beautiful and sound, and after seven years they taught him to ride and to hunt. When he had reached his fourteenth year, they placed him in the hands of four men: the wisest, the most upright, the most temperate, and the bravest of the nation. The first taught him religion, the second to be always truthful, the third to make himself master of unworthy desires, the fourth to fear nothing.
(a) It is a matter worthy of very serious consideration, that, in that excellent form of government of Lycurgus,[5] — in truth, it was a prodigy from its perfection, — although so heedful of the bringing up of children as its principal office, and in the very resting-place of the Muses, there is so little mention made of scholarship; as if those noble-minded
