ON THOSE WHO ARE PUNISHED BY THE DEITY LATE.

For sometimes, when a man falls into a grievous but not incurable malady, which afterwards by intemperance and negligence ruins his constitution and kills him, is not his son, who is not supposed to be suffering from the same malady but only to have a predisposition for it, enjoined to a careful manner of living by his medical man, or friend, or intelligent trainer in gymnastics, or honest guardian, and recommended to abstain from fish and pastry, wine and women, and to take medicine frequently, and to go in for training in the gymnasiums, and so to dissipate and get rid of the small seeds of what might be a serious malady, if he allowed it to come to a head? Do we not indeed give advice of this kind to the children of diseased fathers or mothers, bidding them take care and be cautious and not to neglect themselves, but at once to arrest the first germ, of the malady, nipping it in the bud while removable, and before it has got a firm footing in the constitution?" "Certainly we do," said all the company. "We are not then," I continued, "acting in a strange or ridiculous but in a necessary and useful way, in arranging their exercise and food and physic for the sons of epileptic or atrabilious or gouty people, not when they are ill, but to prevent their becoming so. For the offspring of a poor constitution does not require punishment, but it does require medical treatment and care, and if any one stigmatizes this, because it curtails pleasure and involves some self-denial and pain, as a punishment inflicted by cowardice and timidity, we care not for his opinion. Can it be right to tend and care for the body that has an hereditary predisposition to some malady, and are we to neglect the growth and spread in the young character of hereditary taint of vice, and to dally with it, and wait till it be plainly mixed up with the feelings, and, to use the language of Pindar, "produce malignant fruit in the heart?"