["Nothing is a vice in itself."--Seneca, Ep., 95.]

I almost equally hate a stupid and slothful laziness, as I do a toilsome
and painful employment; this pinches, the other lays me asleep. I like
wounds as well as bruises, and cuts as well as dry blows. I found in
this commerce, when I was the most able for it, a just moderation betwixt
these extremes. Love is a sprightly, lively, and gay agitation; I was
neither troubled nor afflicted with it, but heated, and moreover,
disordered; a man must stop there; it hurts nobody but fools. A young
man asked the philosopher Panetius if it were becoming a wise man to be
in love? "Let the wise man look to that," answered he, "but let not thou
and I, who are not so, engage ourselves in so stirring and violent an
affair, that enslaves us to others, and renders us contemptible to
ourselves." He said true that we are not to intrust a thing so
precipitous in itself to a soul that has not wherewithal to withstand its
assaults and disprove practically the saying of Agesilaus, that prudence
and love cannot live together. 'Tis a vain employment, 'tis true,
unbecoming, shameful, and illegitimate; but carried on after this manner,
I look upon it as wholesome, and proper to enliven a drowsy soul and to
rouse up a heavy body; and, as an experienced physician, I would
prescribe it to a man of my form and condition, as soon as any other
recipe whatever, to rouse and keep him in vigour till well advanced in
years, and to defer the approaches of age. Whilst we are but in the
suburbs, and that the pulse yet beats:

"Dum nova canities, dum prima et recta senectus,
Dum superest lachesi quod torqueat, et pedibus me
Porto meis, nullo dextram subeunte bacillo,"

["Whilst the white hair is new, whilst old age is still straight