(60.) We often pretend to praise immoderately some men who hardly deserve it, and to raise them, if it were possible, on a level with those who are really eminent, either because we are tired of admiring always the same persons, or because their fame, being divided, is less offensive to behold, and seems to us less brilliant and easier to be borne. (61.) We see some men carried along by the propitious gale of favour, and, in one moment, they lose sight of land, and continue their course; everything smiles on them, and they are successful in whatever they undertake; their deeds and their works are extolled and well rewarded, and when they appear they are caressed and congratulated. A firm rock stands on the coast, and breakers dash against its base; all the blasts of power, riches, violence, flattery, authority, and favour cannot shake it. The public is the rock against which these men are dashed to pieces. (62.) It is usual, and, as it were, natural to judge of other menʼs labour only by the affinity it bears to our own. Thus a poet, filled with grand and sublime ideas, does not greatly prize an oratorʼs speech, which is often merely about simple facts; and a man who writes the history of his native land cannot understand how any person of sense can spend his whole life in contriving fictions or hunting after a rhyme; and a divine, immersed in the study of the first four centuries,[640] thinks all other learning and science sad, idle, and useless, whilst he perhaps is as much despised by a mathematician. (63.) A man may have intelligence enough to excel in a particular thing and lecture on it, and yet not have sense enough to know he ought to be silent on some other subject of which he has but a slight knowledge; if such an illustrious man ventures beyond the bounds of his capacity, he loses his way, and talks like a fool. (64.) Whether Herillus talks, declaims, or writes, he is continually quoting; he brings in the prince of philosophers[641] to tell you that wine will make you intoxicated, and the Roman orator[642] to say that water qualifies it. When he discourses of morals, it is not he, but the divine Plato who assures us that virtue is amiable, vice odious, and that both will become habitual. The most common and well-known things, which he himself might have thought out, he attributes to the ancients, the Romans and Greeks; it is not to give more authority to what he says, nor perhaps to get more credit for learning, but merely for the sake of employing quotations.