"Friend, the hook will not stick in such soft cheese." It is a commerce that requires relation and correspondence: the other pleasures we receive may be acknowledged by recompenses of another nature, but this is not to be paid but with the same kind of coin. In earnest, in this sport, the pleasure I give more tickles my imagination than that they give me; now, he has nothing of generosity in him who can receive pleasure where he confers none--it must needs be a mean soul that will owe all, and can be content to maintain relations with persons to whom he is a continual charge; there is no beauty, grace, nor privacy so exquisite that a gentleman ought to desire at this rate. If they can only be kind to us out of pity, I had much rather die than live upon charity. I would have right to ask, in the style wherein I heard them beg in Italy: "Fate ben per voi,"--["Do good for yourself."]-- or after the manner that Cyrus exhorted his soldiers, "Who loves himself let him follow me."--"Consort yourself," some one will say to me, "with women of your own condition, whom like fortune will render more easy to your desire." O ridiculous and insipid composition!
"Nolo Barbam vellere mortuo leoni."
["I would not pluck the beard from a dead lion."--Martial]
Xenophon lays it for an objection and an accusation against Menon, that he never made love to any but old women. For my part, I take more pleasure in but seeing the just and sweet mixture of two young beauties, or only in meditating on it in my fancy, than myself in acting second in a pitiful and imperfect conjunction;
[Which Cotton renders, "Than to be myself an actor in the second with a deformed creature."]
I leave that fantastic appetite to the Emperor Galba, who was only for old curried flesh: and to this poor wretch:
"O ego Di faciant talem to cernere possim, Caraque mutatis oscula ferre comis, Amplectique meis corpus non pingue lacertis!"
[Ovid, who (Ex. Ponto, i. 4, 49) writes to his wife, "O would the gods arrange that such I might see thee, and bring dear kisses to thy changed locks, and embrace thy withered body with my arms"]
Amongst chief deformities I reckon forced and artificial beauties: Hemon, a young boy of Chios, thinking by fine dressing to acquire the beauty that nature had denied him, came to the philosopher Arcesilaus and asked him if it was possible for a wise man to be in love--"Yes," replied he, "provided it be not with a farded and adulterated beauty like thine."
[Diogenes Laertius, iv. 3? The question was whether a wise man could love him. Cotton has "Emonez, a young courtezan of Chios."]
Ugliness of a confessed antiquity is to me less old and less ugly than another that is polished and plastered up. Shall I speak it, without the danger of having my throat cut? love, in my opinion, is not properly and naturally in its season, but in the age next to childhood, "Quem si puellarum insereres choro, Mille sagaces falleret hospites, Discrimen obscurum, solutis Crinibus ambiguoque vultu:"
["Whom if thou shouldst place in a company of girls, it would require a thousand experts to distinguish him, with his loose locks and ambiguous countenance."--Horace, Od., ii. 5, 21.] nor beauty neither; for whereas Homer extends it so far as to the budding of the beard, Plato himself has remarked this as rare: and the reason why the sophist Bion so pleasantly called the first appearing hairs of adolescence 'Aristogitons' and 'Harmodiuses'-[Plutarch, On Love, c.34.]--is sufficiently known. I find it in virility already in some sort a little out of date, though not so much as in old age;
"Importunus enim transvolat aridas Quercus."
