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Some plants there are, in their own nature wild and
barren, and hurtful to seed and garden-sets, which yet
among able husbandmen pass for infallible signs of a rich
and promising soil. In like manner, some passions of the
mind not good in themselves yet serve as first shoots and
promises of a disposition which is naturally good, and also
capable of much improvement by cultivation. Among
these I rank bashfulness, the subject of our present discourse; no ill sign indeed, but the cause and occasion of
a great deal of harm. For the bashful oftentimes run into
the same enormities as the most hardened and impudent,
with this difference only, that the former feel a regret for
such miscarriages, but the latter take a pleasure and satisfaction therein. The shameless person is without sense of
grief for his baseness, and the bashful is in distress at the
very appearance of it. For bashfulness is only modesty
in the excess, and is aptly enough named δυσωπία (the
being put out of countenance), since the face is in some
sense confused and dejected with the mind. For as that
grief which casts down the eyes is termed dejection, so
that kind of modesty which cannot look another in the
face is called bashfulness. The orator, speaking of a
shameless fellow, said he carried harlots, not virgins, in
his eyes;1 on the other hand, the sheepishly bashful betrays
[p. 61]
no less the effeminacy and softness of his mind in
his looks, palliating his weakness, which exposes him to
the mercy of impudence, with the specious name of modesty. Cato indeed was wont to say of young persons, he
had a greater opinion of such as were subject to color than
of those that looked pale; teaching us thereby to look with
greater apprehension on the heinousness of an action than
on the reprimand which might follow, and to be more afraid
of the suspicion of doing an ill thing than of the danger
of it. However, too much anxiety and timidity lest we
may do wrong is also to be avoided; because many men
have become cowards and been deterred from generous
undertakings, no less for fear of calumny and detraction
than by the danger or difficulty of such attempts.
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