erhaps a sort of intemperateness of delight in
knowing everything, and as it were a stream violently bearing down the
reasoning faculty. But now, when a story that hath in it nothing that is
troubling and afflictive treats of great and heroic enterprises with a
potency and grace of style such as we find in Herodotus's Grecian and in
Xenophon's Persian history, or in what,

Inspired by heavenly gods, sage Homer sung,

or in the Travels of Euxodus, the Foundations and Republics of
Aristotle, and the Lives of Famous Men compiled by Aristoxenus; these
will not only bring us exceeding much and great contentment, but such
also as is clean and secure from repentance. And who could take greater
satisfaction either in eating when a-hungry or drinking when a-dry
amongst the Phaeacians, than in going over Ulysses's relation of his
own voyage and rambles? And what man could be better pleased with the
embraces of the most exquisite beauty, than with sitting up all night
to read over what Xenophon hath written of Panthea, or Aristobulus of
Timoclea, or Theopompus of Thebe?

But now these appertain all solely to the mind. But they chase away
from them the delights that accrue from the mathematics also. Though the
satisfactions we receive from history have in them something simple and
equal; but those that come from geometry, astronomy, and music inveigle
and allure us with a sort of nimbleness and variety, and want nothing
that is tempting and engaging; their figures attracting us as so many
charms, whereof whoever hath once tasted, if he be but competently
skilled, will run about chanting that in Sophocles,

I'm mad; the Muses with new rage inspire me.
I'll mount the hill; my lyre, my numbers fire me.
(From the "Thamyras" of Sophocles, Frag. 225)

Nor doth Thamyras break out into poetic raptures upon any other score;
nor, by Jove, Euxodus, Aristarchus, or Archimedes. And when the lovers
of the art of painting are so enamoured with the charmingness of their
own performances, that Nicias, as he was drawing the Evocation of Ghosts
in Homer, often asked his servants whether he had dined or no, and when
King Ptolemy had sent him threescore talents for his piece, after it was
finished, he neither would accept the money nor part with his work; what
and how great satisfactions may we then suppose to have been reaped
from geometry and astronomy by Euclid when he wrote his Dioptrics, by
Philippus when he had perfected