Persons lightly dipt, not grained, in generous honesty
are but pale in goodness and faint-hued in sincerity.
But be thou what thou virtuously art, and let not the
ocean wash away thy tincture. Stand majestically upon
that axis where prudent simplicity hath fixed thee;
and at no temptation invert the poles of thy honesty
that vice may be uneasy and even monstrous unto
thee; let iterated good acts and long confirmed habits
make virtue natural or a second nature in thee; and since
few or none prove eminently virtuous but from some
advantageous foundations in their temper and natural
inclinations, study thyself betimes, and early find what
nature bids thee to be or tells thee what thou mayest
be. They who thus timely descend into themselves,
cultivating the good seeds which nature hath set in them,
and improving their prevalent inclinations to perfection,
become not shrubs but cedars in their generation. And
to be in the form of the best of bad, or the worst of the
good, will be no satisfaction unto them.
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