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INTEGRITY.
[Illustration: Letter C.]
Can anything (says Plato) be more delightful than the hearing or the
speaking of truth? For this reason it is that there is no conversation
so agreeable that of a man of integrity, who hears without any intention
to betray, and speaks without any intention to deceive. As an advocate
was pleading the cause of his client in Rome, before one of the
praetors, he could only produce a single witness in a point where the
law required the testimony of two persons; upon which the advocate
insisted on the integrity of the person whom he had produced, but the
praetor told him that where the law required two witnesses he would not
accept of one, though it were Cato himself. Such a speech, from a person
who sat at the head of a court of justice, while Cato was still living,
shows us, more than a thousand examples, the high reputation this great
man had gained among his contemporaries on account of his sincerity.
[Illustration]
2. As I was sitting (says an ancient writer) with some senators of
Bruges, before the gate of the Senate-House, a certain beggar presented
himself to us, and with sighs and tears, and many lamentable gestures,
expressed to us his miserable poverty, and asked our alms, telling us at
the same time, that he had about him a private maim and a secret
mischief, which very shame restrained him from discovering to the eyes
of men.
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