Plutarch's Morals · Plutarch
ON SHYNESS.[636]
Sec. XIX. A useful precept in reference to all passions is especially valuable in the case of the bashful. When they have been overcome by this infirmity, and against their judgement have erred and been confounded, let them fix it in their memories, and, remembering the pain and grief it gave them, let them recall it to their mind and be on their guard for a very long time. For as travellers that have stumbled against a stone, or pilots that have been wrecked off a headland, if they remember these occurrences, not only dread and are on their guard continually on those spots, but also on all similar ones; so those that frequently remember the disgrace and injury that bashfulness brought them, and its sorrow and anguish, will in similar cases be on their guard against their weakness, and will not readily allow themselves to be subjugated by it again. [636] Or _bashfulness_, _shamefacedness_, what the French call _mauvaise honte_. [637] Shakespeare puts all this into one line: "Most subject is the fattest soil to weeds."--_2 Henry IV._, A. iv. Sc. iv. [638] Or _girls_. [Greek: kore] means both a girl, and the pupil of the eye. [639] So Wyttenbach. [640] These lines are quoted again "On Moral Virtue," Sec. vi. [641] "Iliad," xxiv. 44, 45. [642] Euripides, "Bellerophon," Fragm., 313.
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