k tongue--which I
contemned not like Cato, but had not the leisure in my younger years to
attend the study of it--and take much delight in the reading of Plutarch's
Morals, the pleasant Dialogues of Plato, the Monuments of Pausanias, and
the Antiquities of Athenaeus, in waiting on the hour wherein God my Creator
shall call me and command me to depart from this earth and transitory
pilgrimage. Wherefore, my son, I admonish thee to employ thy youth to
profit as well as thou canst, both in thy studies and in virtue. Thou art
at Paris, where the laudable examples of many brave men may stir up thy
mind to gallant actions, and hast likewise for thy tutor and pedagogue the
learned Epistemon, who by his lively and vocal documents may instruct thee
in the arts and sciences.

I intend, and will have it so, that thou learn the languages perfectly;
first of all the Greek, as Quintilian will have it; secondly, the Latin;
and then the Hebrew, for the Holy Scripture sake; and then the Chaldee and
Arabic likewise, and that thou frame thy style in Greek in imitation of
Plato, and for the Latin after Cicero. Let there be no history which thou
shalt not have ready in thy memory; unto the prosecuting of which design,
books of cosmography will be very conducible and help thee much. Of the
liberal arts of geometry, arithmetic, and music, I gave thee some taste
when thou wert yet little, and not above five or six years old. Proceed
further in them, and learn the remainder if thou canst. As for astronomy,
study all the rules thereof. Let pass, nevertheless, the divining and
judicial astrology, and the art of Lullius, as being nothing else but plain
abuses and vanities. As for the civil law, of that I would have thee to
know the texts by heart, and then to confer them with philosophy.

Now, in matter of the knowledge of the works of nature, I would have thee
to study that exactly, and that so there be no sea, river, nor fountain, of
which thou dost not know the fishes; all the fowls of the air; all the
several kinds of shrubs and trees, whether in forests or orchards; all the
sorts of herbs and flowers that grow upon the ground; all the various
metals that are hid within the bowels of the earth; together with all the
diversity of precious stones that are to be seen in the orient and south
parts of the world. Let nothing of all these be hidden from thee. Then
fail not most carefully to peruse the books of the Greek, Arabian, and
Latin