Hermotimus

The youth’s uncle was there, a rustic person without any notion of your refinements; and by way of stilling the storm, Come, come, sir, says he, you need not make such a fuss because we have bought words of you and not yet settled the bill. As to what you have sold us, you have got tt still; your stock of learning is none the less; and in what I really sent the boy to you for, you have not improved him a bit; he has carried off and seduced neighbour Echecrates’s daughter, and there would have been an action for assault, only Echecrates ts a poor man; but the prank cost me a couple of bundred. And the other day he struck bis mother; she had tried to stop him when he was smuggling wine out of the house, for one of his club-dinners, I suppose. As to temper and conceit and impudence and brass and lying, he was not half so bad twelve months ago as he is now. That 1s where I should have liked him to profit by your teaching; and we could have done without bis knowing the stuff he reels off at table every day: 'a

crocodile [*](See Puzzles in Notes.) seized hold of a baby,’ says he, ‘and promised to give tt back if its father could answer’—the Lord knows what; or how, ‘day[*](See Puzzles in Notes.) being, night cannot be’; and sometimes his worship twists round what we say somehow or other, till there we are with horns? on our beads! We just laugh at it—most of all when be stuffs up bis ears and repeats to himself what he calls temperaments and conditions and conceptions and impressions, and a lot more like that. And he tells us God is not in heaven, but goes about in everything, wood and stone and animals—the meanest of them, too; and if his mother asks him why he talks such stuff, he laughs at her and says if once he gets the ‘stuff’ pat off, there will be nothing to prevent him from being the only rich man, the only king, and counting every one else slaves and offscourings.

When he had finished, mark the reverend philosopher’s answer, You should consider, he said, that if he had never come to me, he would have behaved far worse—very possibly have come to the gallows. As it 1s, philosophy and the respect he has for it have been a check upon him, so that you find he keeps within bounds and is not quite unbearable; the philosophic system and name tutor him with their presence, and the thought of disgracing them shames him. I should be quite justified in taking your money, if not for any positive improvement I have effected, yet for the abstentions due to bis respect for philosophy; the very nurses will tell you as much: children should go to school, because, even if they are not old enough to learn, they will at least be out of mischief there. My conscience is quite easy about him; if you like to select any of your friends who ts acquainted with Stoicism and bring him bere to-morrow, you shall see how the boy can question and answer, how much he has learnt, how many books he has read on axioms, syllogisms, conceptions, duty, and all sorts of subjects. As for his hitting bis mother or seducing girls, what have I to do with that? am I his keeper?