Page 34 - UTOPIA

may gather how little courtiers would value either me or my
counsels.’
To this I answered, ‘You have done me a great kindness
in this relation; for as everything has been related by you
both wisely and pleasantly, so you have made me imag-
ine that I was in my own country and grown young again,
by recalling that good Cardinal to my thoughts, in whose
family I was bred from my childhood; and though you are,
upon other accounts, very dear to me, yet you are the dear-
er because you honour his memory so much; but, after all
this, I cannot change my opinion, for I still think that if you
could overcome that aversion which you have to the courts
of princes, you might, by the advice which it is in your pow-
er to give, do a great deal of good to mankind, and this is the
chief design that every good man ought to propose to him-
self in living; for your friend Plato thinks that nations will
be happy when either philosophers become kings or kings
become philosophers. It is no wonder if we are so far from
that happiness while philosophers will not think it their
duty to assist kings with their counsels.’ ‘They are not so
base-minded,’ said he, ‘but that they would willingly do it;
many of them have already done it by their books, if those
that are in power would but hearken to their good advice.
But Plato judged right, that except kings themselves became
philosophers, they who from their childhood are corrupt-
ed with false notions would never fall in entirely with the
counsels of philosophers, and this he himself found to be
true in the person of Dionysius.
‘Do not you think that if I were about any king, propos-

34 Utopia