[2] But now, as the poets feign concerning Lamia, that upon her going to bed she lays
aside her eyes among the attirements of her dressing-box, and is at home for the most
part blind and drowsy too, and puts on her eyes only when she goes abroad a gadding;
so it is with most men, who, through a kind of an affected ignorance and artificial
blindness, commonly blunder and stumble at their own threshold, are the greatest
strangers to their own personal defects, and of all others least familiarly acquainted
with their own domestic ills and follies. But when they look abroad, their sight
is sharpened with all the watchful and laborious curiosity imaginable, which serves
as deforming spectacles to an evil eye, that is already envenomed by the malignity
of a worse nature.
And hence it is, that a person of this busy meddlesome disposition is a greater
friend to them he hates than to himself; for overlooking his own concerns, through
his being so heedfully intent on those of other men, he reproves and exposes their
miscarriages, admonishes them of the errors and follies they ought to correct, and
affrights them into greater caution for the future; so that not only the careless
and unwary, but even the more sober and prudent persons, may gain no small advantage
from the impertinence and ill-nature of inquisitive people.
It was a remarkable instance of the prudence of Ulysses, that, going into the
regions of departed souls, he would not exchange so much as one word with his mother
there till he had first obtained an answer from the oracle and despatched the
business he came about; and then, turning to her, he afforded some small time for a
few impertinent questions about the other women upon the place, asking which was
Tyro, and which the fair Chloris, and concerning the unfortunate Epicasta, why,
Noosed to a lofty beam, she would suspended die.
But we through extreme sloth and ignorance, being stupidly careless of our own
affairs, must be idly spending our time and talk either about our neighbor's
pedigree, how that such a one had a tapster for his grandfather, and that his
grandmother was a laundress; or that another owes three or four talents, and is
not able to pay the interest. Nay, and such trivial stuff as this we busy ourselves
about, — where such a man’s wife has been all this while; and what
it was, that this and the other fellow have been talking of in a corner. But the
wise Socrates employed his curiosity to better purpose, when he went about enquiring
by what excellent precepts Pythagoras obtained so great authority among his
followers; and Aristippus, meeting Ischomachus at the Olympic games, asked him
what those notions were with which Socrates had so powerfully charmed the minds
of his young scholars; upon the slight information whereof, he was so passionately
inflamed with a desire of going to Athens, that he grew pale and lean, and almost
languished till he came to drink of the fountain itself, and had been acquainted
with the person of Socrates, and more fully learned that philosophy of his, the
design of which was to teach men how to discover their own ills and apply proper
remedies to them.