urt by study, should take away no profit thereat. This knew
Erasmus very well, when he was here in Cambridge; which, when he had
been sore at his book (as Garret our book-binder had very often told
me), for lack of better exercise, would take his horse and ride about
the market-hill and come again. If a scholar should use bowls or tennis,
the labor is too vehement and unequal, which is condemned of Galen; the
example very ill for other men, when by so many acts they be made
unlawful. Running, leaping, and quoiting be too vile for scholars, and
so not fit by Aristotle's judgment; walking alone into the field hath no
token of courage in it, a pastime like a simple man which is neither
flesh nor fish. Therefore if a man would have a pastime wholesome and
equal for every part of the body, pleasant and full of courage for the
mind, not vile and unhonest to give ill example to laymen, not kept in
gardens and corners, not lurking on the night and in holes, but evermore
in the face of men, either to rebuke it when it doeth ill, or else to
testify on it when it doth well, let him seek chiefly of all other
for shooting.

ATHENAEUS

(Third Century A.D.)

Little is known that is authentic about the Graeco-Egyptian Sophist or
man of letters, Athenaeus, author of the 'Deipnosophistae' or Feast of
the Learned, except his literary bequest. It is recorded that he was
born at Naucratis, a city of the Nile Delta; and that after living at
Alexandria he migrated to Rome. His date is presumptively fixed in the
early part of the third century by his inclusion of Ulpian, the eminent
jurist (whose death occurred A.D. 228) among the twenty-nine guests of
the banquet whose wit and learning furnished its viands. He was perhaps
a contemporary of the physician Galen, another of the putative
banqueters, who served as a mouthpiece of the author's erudition.

Probably nothing concerning him deserved preservation except his unique
work, the 'Feast of the Learned.' Of the fifteen books transmitted under
the above title, the first two, and portions of the third, eleventh, and
fifteenth, exist only in epitome--the name of the compiler and his time
being equally obscure; yet it is curious that for many centuries these
garbled fragments were the only memorials of the author extant. The
other books, constituting the major portion of the work, have been
pronounced authentic by eminent scholars with Bentley at their head.
Without the slightest pretens