27
ZEUXIPPUS. As for those inconveniences which sordidness and poverty bring upon many, as gathering of fruit, continual labor, and running about, and want of rest, which fall heavy upon the weaker parts of the body and such as are inwardly infirm, we need not fear that any man of employ or scholar — to whom our present discourse belongs — should be troubled with them. But there is a severe sort of sordidness as to their studies, which they ought to avoid, by which they are forced many times to neglect their body, oftentimes denying it a supply when it has (lone its work, making the mortal part of us do its share in work as well as the immortal, and the earthly part as much as the heavenly. But, as the ox said to his fellow-servant the camel, when he refused to ease him of his burthen, It won’t be long before you carry my burthen and me too: which fell out to be true, when the ox died. So it happens to the mind, when it refuses that little relaxation and comfort which it needs in its labor; for a little while after a fever or vertigo seizes us, and then reading, discoursing, and disputing must be laid aside, and it is forced to partake of the body’s distemper. Plato therefore rightly exhorts us not to employ the mind without the body, nor the body without the mind, but to drive them equally like a pair of horses; and when at any time the body toils and labors with the mind, then to be the more careful of it, and thus to gain its wellbeloved health, believing that it obliges us with the best of things when it is no impediment to our knowledge and enjoyment of virtue, either in business or discourse.
