lute
in their promiscuous conversing; whence Euripides affirms in
"Andromache," that their women were all unchaste. Thus much may give
us light after what sort of books were prohibited among the Greeks.

The Romans also for many ages trained up only to a military roughness,
resembling most the Lacedaemonian guise, knew of learning little but
what their twelve tables, and the Pontific College with their augurs
and flamens taught them in religion and law, so unacquainted with
other learning, that when Carneades and Critolaus, with the Stoic
Diogenes, coming ambassadors to Rome, took thereby occasion to give
the city a taste of their philosophy, they were suspected for seducers
by no less a man than Cato the Censor, who moved it in the Senate to
dismiss them speedily, and to banish all such Attic babblers out of
Italy. But Scipio and others of the noblest senators withstood him and
his old Sabine austerity; honored and admired the men; and the censor
himself at last, in his old age, fell to the study of that whereof
before he was so scrupulous. And yet at the same time, Naevius and
Plautus, the first Latin comedians, had filled the city with all the
borrowed scenes of Menander and Philemon. Then began to be considered
there also what was to be done to libelous books and authors; for
Naevius was quickly cast into prison for his unbridled pen, and
released by the tribunes upon his recantation; we read also that
libels were burnt, and the makers punished by Augustus. The like
severity, no doubt, was used, if aught were impiously written against
their esteemed gods. Except in these two points, how the world went in
books, the magistrate kept no reckoning.

V

A NOBLE AND PUISSANT NATION[82]

Lords and Commons of England, consider what nation it is whereof ye
are, and whereof ye are the governors: a nation not slow and dull, but
of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and
sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point, the highest
that human capacity can soar to. Therefore the studies of Learning in
her deepest sciences have been so ancient and so eminent among us,
that writers of good antiquity and ablest judgment have been persuaded
that even the school of Pythagoras and the Persian wisdom took
beginning from the old philosophy of this island. And that wise and
civil Roman, Julius Agricola, who governed once here for Caesar,
preferred the natural wits of Britain before the labo