But didst Thou fail me even by that old man, or
forbear to heal my soul? For having become more acquainted with him,
and hanging assiduously and fixedly on his speech (for though in
simple terms, it was vivid, lively, and earnest), when he had gathered
by my discourse that I was given to the books of nativity-casters,
he kindly and fatherly advised me to cast them away, and not
fruitlessly bestow a care and diligence, necessary for useful
things, upon these vanities; saying, that he had in his earliest years
studied that art, so as to make it the profession whereby he should
live, and that, understanding Hippocrates, he could soon have
understood such a study as this; and yet he had given it over, and
taken to physic, for no other reason but that he found it utterly
false; and he, a grave man, would not get his living by deluding
people. "But thou," saith he, "hast rhetoric to maintain thyself by,
so that thou followest this of free choice, not of necessity: the more
then oughtest thou to give me credit herein, who laboured to acquire
it so perfectly as to get my living by it alone.
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