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Over Megalopolis Lydiadas was tyrant; but then, even in the time of his tyranny, changing his manners and maxims of government and growing into a hatred of injustice, he restored to the citizens their laws, and fighting for his country against his own and his subjects’ enemies, fell an illustrious victim for his country’s welfare. Now if any one, bearing an antipathy to Miltiades or Cimon, had slain the one tyrannizing in the Chersonese or the other committing incest with his own sister, or had expelled Themistocles out of Athens at what time he lay rioting and revelling in the market-place and affronting all that came near him, according to the sentence afterwards pronounced against Alcibiades, had we not lost Marathon, the Eurymedon, and lovely Artemisium, Where the Athenian youth The famed foundations of their freedom laid?From Pindar. For great and lofty geniuses produce nothing that is mean and little; the innate smartness of their parts will not endure the vigor and activity of their spirits to grow lazy; but they are tossed to and again, as with the waves, by the rolling motions of their own inordinate desire, till at length they arrive to a stable and settled constitution of manners. Therefore, as a person that is unskilful in husbandry would by no means make choice of a piece of ground quite overrun with brakes and weeds, abounding with wild beasts, running streams, and mud; while, to him who hath learnt to understand the nature of the earth, these are certain symptoms of the softness and fertility of the soil; thus great geniuses many times produce many absurd and vile enormities, of which we not enduring the rugged and uneasy vexation, are presently for pruning and lopping off the lawless transgressors. But the more prudent judge, who discerns the abounding goodness and generosity covertly residing in those transcendent geniuses, waits the co-operating age and season for reason and virtue to exert themselves, and gathers the ripe fruit when Nature has matured it. And thus much as to those particulars.
