CHAP. XLVI.
How it comes to pass that in a City the same Family retains the same manners and customs a long time.
IT appears that not only one City has its manners and institutions different; and produ∣ces men more austere, or effeminate than the rest; but in the same City Families are frequently found to have the same difference. Of this there are multitude of Examples, and particularly in Rome. The Manlii were always rigid and severe: The Publicoli benign, and lovers of the people: The Appii ambitious and enemies to the people, and so in several other Families they had their peculiar qualities that discriminated them from the rest; which cannot proceed barely from their extraction and blood (for that must of necessity have been altred by the variety of their Marriages) but rather from the diversity of their Education, in the several Families; for it is a great matter when a man is accustomed to hear well or ill of any thing from his infancy; and makes such an impression in him, that from thence he many times regulates his conversation as long as he lives; and if this were not so, it would have been impossible that all the Appii should have been agitated by the same passion and ambition, as Livy observed in most of them; and particularly in one of the last, who being made Censor, and to deposite his Office at the expiration of 18 months according to Law, refused it absolutely (though his Colleague resigned) insisting upon an