Virtue Growing By Use

Plutarch, Whether ’twere Rightly Said, Live Concealed, tr. Charles Whitaker (in Plutarch’s Essays And Miscellanies, 1911, vol. III.), 7:

For

    Virtue, like finest brass, by use grows bright.1

And not our houses alone, when (as Sophocles has it) they stand long untenanted, run the faster to ruin; but men’s natural parts, lying unemployed for lack of acquaintance with the world, contract a kind of filth or rust and craziness thereby. For sottish ease, and a life wholly sedentary and given up to idleness, spoil and debilitate not only the body but the soul too. And as close waters shadowed over by bordering trees, and stagnated in default of springs to supply current and motion to them, become foul and corrupt; so, methinks, is it with the innate faculties of a dull unstirring soul,—whatever usefulness, whatever seeds of good she may have latent in her, yet when she puts not these powers into action, when once they stagnate, they lose their vigor and run to decay.

1 Sophocles, Frag. 779.