Page 98 - UTOPIA

can endure more labour when it is necessary; but, except in
that case, they love their ease. They are unwearied pursuers
of knowledge; for when we had given them some hints of the
learning and discipline of the Greeks, concerning whom we
only instructed them (for we know that there was nothing
among the Romans, except their historians and their poets,
that they would value much), it was strange to see how ea-
gerly they were set on learning that language: we began to
read a little of it to them, rather in compliance with their im-
portunity than out of any hopes of their reaping from it any
great advantage: but, after a very short trial, we found they
made such progress, that we saw our labour was like to be
more successful than we could have expected: they learned
to write their characters and to pronounce their language
so exactly, had so quick an apprehension, they remembered
it so faithfully, and became so ready and correct in the use
of it, that it would have looked like a miracle if the great-
er part of those whom we taught had not been men both
of extraordinary capacity and of a fit age for instruction:
they were, for the greatest part, chosen from among their
learned men by their chief council, though some studied it
of their own accord. In three years’ time they became mas-
ters of the whole language, so that they read the best of the
Greek authors very exactly. I am, indeed, apt to think that
they learned that language the more easily from its having
some relation to their own. I believe that they were a colony
of the Greeks; for though their language comes nearer the
Persian, yet they retain many names, both for their towns
and magistrates, that are of Greek derivation. I happened

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