that both this and preceding ages have produced. Yea, we abominate those
that make mention of their great suppers with too luscious a gust, as
men overmuch taken with mean and abject delights. But we find ourselves
in one and the same ecstasy with Eudoxus, Archimedes, and Hipparchus;
and we readily give assent to Plato when he saith of the mathematics,
that while ignorance and unskilledness make men despise them, they still
thrive notwithstanding by reason of their charmingness, in despite of
contempt.

These then so great and so many pleasures, that run like perpetual
springs and rills, these men decline and avoid; nor will they permit
those that put in among them so much as to take a taste of them, but bid
them hoist up the little sails of their paltry cock-boats and fly from
them. Nay, they all, both he and she philosophers, beg and entreat
Pythocles, for dear Epicurus's sake, not to affect or make such account
of the sciences called liberal. And when they cry up and defend one
Apelles, they write of him that he kept himself clean by refraining
himself all along from the mathematics. But as to history--to pass over
their aversedness to other kinds of compositions--I shall only present
you with the words of Metrodorus, who in his treatise of the Poets
writes thus: Wherefore let it never disturb you, if you know not either
what side Hector was of, or the first verses in Homer's Poem, or
again what is in its middle. But that the pleasures of the body spend
themselves like the winds called Etesian or Anniversary, and utterly
determine when once age is past its vigor, Epicurus himself was not
insensible; and therefore he makes it a problematic question, whether a
sage philosopher, when he is an old man and disabled for enjoyment, may
not still be recreated with having handsome girls to feel and grope him,
being not, it seems, of the mind of old Sophocles, who thanked God he
had at length escaped from this kind of pleasure, as from an untamed and
furious master. But, in my opinion, it would be more advisable for these
sensual lechers, when they see that age will dry up so many of their
pleasures, and that, as Euripides saith,

Dame Venus is to ancient men a foe,
(Euripides, "Aeolus," Frag. 23.)

in the first place to collect and lay up in store, as against a siege,
these other pleasures, as a sort of provision that will not impair and
decay; that then, after they have celebrated the venereal festivals
of life,