as he should be, and at haphazard; they could not endure his returning sweating and dusty from his exercises, (c) taking hot or cold drinks,[1] (a) or to see him on a restive horse, or facing a skilful fencer, foil in hand, or his first arquebus. But there is no escape: he who would make of him a man of worth must doubtless not spare him in those early years, and must often run counter to the rules of medicine.
(b) Vitamque sub dio et trepidis agat
In rebus.[2]
(c) It is not enough to strengthen his mind — we must strengthen his muscles also. The mind is too hard pressed if it be not supported,[3] and has too much to do to discharge alone two functions. I know how mine labours[4] in company with so tender, so sensitive a body, which lets itself so greatly depend upon it; and I often observe in my reading that my masters, in their writings, pass off as due to magnanimity and high spirit, examples which usually belong more to thickness of skin and hardness of bone. I have seen men, women, and children of such nature that a flogging is less to them than a fillip to me; who neither cry out nor scowl under the blows that are given to them. When athletes are like philosophers in patience, it is strength of nerve rather than of mind. Now, accustomedness to labour is accustomedness to pain: labor callum obducit dolori.[5] He must be practised in the discomfort and severity of action, to train him for the discomfort and severity of dislocation, of the colic, of the cautery, and of prison, and of torture. For even he may fall into the clutches of these last, which, according to the times, seize upon good men as well as bad. We are experiencing this. He who rebels against the laws renders the best men liable to whippings and the rope.
(a) And then,[6] too, the authority of the tutor over him,[7]
- ↑ Boire chaut, boire frost.
- ↑ Let him live under the open sky and amid dangers. — Horace, Odes, III, 2.5.
- ↑ That is, supported by the body.
- ↑ Ahane = éprouve une grande fatigue en faisant quelque chose.
- ↑ Labor leads to insensibility to pain. — Cicero, Tusc. Disp., II, 15.
- ↑ He now recurs to the discussion of the evils of children being tied to their parents.
- ↑ That is, over the pupil.
