'Why, what,' he exclaims, 'more worthy of the regards of a human creature than his own image' nihil respectabilius homini quam formam suam! Is not that one of our children the most dear to us who is called 'the picture of his father'?
But take what pains you will with a picture, it can never be so like you as the face in your mirror! Think it discreditable to look with proper attention on one's self in the glass! Did not Socrates recommend such attention to his disciples,--did he not make a great moral agent of the speculum?
The handsome, in admiring their beauty therein, were admonished that handsome is who handsome does; and the more the ugly stared at themselves, the more they became naturally anxious to hide the disgrace of their features in the loveliness of their merits.

Was not Demosthenes always at his speculum?
Did he not rehearse his causes before it as before a master in the art?
He learned his eloquence from Plato, his dialectics from Eubulides; but as for his delivery--there, he came to the mirror! "Therefore," concluded Mr.Caxton, returning unexpectedly to the subject,--"therefore, it is no reason to suppose that Dr.Riccabocca is averse to cleanliness and decent care of the person because he is a philosopher; and, all things considered, he never showed himself more a philosopher than when he left off his spectacles and looked his best." "Well," said my mother, kindly, "I only hope it may turn out happily.
But I should have been better pleased if Pisistratus had not made Dr.
Riccabocca so reluctant a wooer." "Very true," said the captain; "the Italian does not shine as a lover.
Throw a little more fire into him, Pisistratus,--something gallant and chivalrous." "Fire! gallantry! chivalry!" cried my father, who had taken Riccabocca under his special protection; "why, don't you see that the man is described as a philosopher ?--and I should like to know when a philosopher ever plunged into matrimony without considerable misgivings and cold shivers! Indeed, it seems that--perhaps before he was a philosopher--Riccabocca had tried the experiment, and knew what it was.

Why, even that plain-speaking, sensible, practical man, Metellus Numidicus, who was not even a philosopher, but only a Roman censor, thus expressed himself in an exhortation to the people to perpetrate matrimony: 'If, O Quirites, we could do without wives, we should all dispense with that subject of care _ea molestia careremus;_ but since nature has so managed it that we cannot live with women comfortably, nor without them at all, let us rather provide for the human race than our own temporary felicity.'" Here the ladies set up such a cry of indignation, that both Roland and myself endeavoured to appease their wrath by hasty assurances that we utterly repudiated the damnable doctrine of Metellus Numidicus.
My father, wholly unmoved, as soon as a sullen silence was established, recommenced.

"Do not think, ladies," said he, "that you were without advocates at that day: there were many Romans gallant enough to blame the censor for a mode of expressing himself which they held to be equally impolite and injudicious.

'Surely,' said they, with some plausibility, if Numidicus wished men to marry, he need not have referred so peremptorily to the disquietudes of the connection, and thus have made them more inclined to turn away from matrimony than give them a relish for it.' But against these critics one honest man (whose name of Titus Castricius should not be forgotten by posterity) maintained that Metellus Numidicus could not have spoken more properly; 'For remark,' said he, 'that Metellus was a censor, not a rhetorician.