that of Venus, if we heed it, that light
music and wanton songs and discourses which suggest to men obscene
fancies debauch their manners, and incline them to an unmanly way of
living in luxury and wantonness, of continually haunting the company of
women, and of being

Given to fashions, that their garb may please,
Hot baths, and couches where they loll at case.

And therefore also he brings in Ulysses directing the musician thus,--

Leave this, and sing the horse, out of whose womb
The gallant knights that conquered Troy did come;
("Odyssey," viii. 249 and 492.)

evidently teaching us that poets and musicians ought to receive the
arguments of their songs from sober and understanding men. And in the
other fable of Juno he excellently shows that the conversation of women
with men, and the favors they receive from them procured by sorcery,
witchcraft, or other unlawful arts, are not only short, unstable,
and soon cloying, but also in the issue easily turned to loathing
and displeasure, when once the pleasure is over. For so Jupiter there
threatens Juno, when he tells her,--

Hear this, remember, and our fury dread,
Nor pull the unwilling vengeance on thy head;
Lest arts and blandishments successless prove
Thy soft deceits and well dissembled love.
("Iliad," xv. 32.)

For the fiction and representation of evil acts, when it withal
acquaints us with the shame and damage befalling the doers, hurts not
but rather profits him that reads them. For which end philosophers make
use of examples for our instruction and correction out of historical
collections; and poets do the very same thing, but with this difference,
that they invent fabulous examples themselves. There was one Melanthius,
who (whether in jest or earnest he said it, it matters not much)
affirmed that the city of Athens owed its preservation to the
dissensions and factions that were among the orators, giving withal this
reason for his assertion, that thereby they were kept from inclining
all of them to one side, so that by means of the differences among those
statesmen there were always some that drew the saw the right way for
the defeating of destructive counsels. And thus it is too in the
contradictions among poets, which, by lessening the credit of what they
say, render them the less powerful to do mischief; and therefore, when
comparing one saying with another we discover their contrariety, we
ought to a