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the understanding, engenders thoughts and knowledge, animates virtue and good resolution, sooths and allays the passions, and finds employment for most of the vacant hours in life. Next to such an intimacy with a particular person, one would endeavour after a more general conversation with such as are able to entertain and improve those with whom they converse, which are qualifications that seldom go asunder. But of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces, as the reading of useful and entertaining authors. being the pursuit of knowledge.

note No: 94. /note the hours of a Wise man are lengthened by his Ideas, as those of a fool are by his passions: The time of the one is long, because he does not know what to do with it; so is that of the other, because he distinguishes every moment of it with useful or amusing thoughts; or in other words, because the one is always wishing it away, and the other always enjoying it. How different is the view of past life, in the man who is grown old in Knowledge and Wisdom, from that of him who is grown