his demonstration of the figure of the
moon, by Archimedes when with the help of a certain angle he had found
the sun's diameter to make the same part of the largest circle that that
angle made of four right angles, and by Apollonius and Aristarchus who
were the inventors of some other things of the like nature? The bare
contemplating and comprehending of all these now engender in the
learners both unspeakable delights and a marvellous height of spirit.
And it doth in no wise beseem me, by comparing with these the fulsome
debauchees of victualling-houses and stews, to contaminate Helicon and
the Muses,--

Where swain his flock ne'er fed,
Nor tree by hatchet bled.
(Euripides, "Hippolytus," 75.)

But these are the verdant and untrampled pastures of ingenious bees;
but those are more like the mange of lecherous boars and he-goats. And
though a voluptuous temper of mind be naturally erratic and precipitate,
yet never any yet sacrificed an ox for joy that he had gained his will
of his mistress; nor did any ever wish to die immediately, might he but
once satiate himself with the costly dishes and comfits at the table of
his prince. But now Eudoxus wished he might stand by the sun, and inform
himself of the figure, magnitude, and beauty of that luminary, though
he were, like Phaethon, consumed by it. And Pythagoras offered an ox in
sacrifice for having completed the lines of a certain geometric diagram;
as Apollodotus tells us,

When the famed lines Pythagoras devised,
For which a splendid ox he sacrificed.

Whether it was that by which he showed that the line that regards the
right angle in a triangle is equivalent to the two lines that contain
that angle, or the problem about the area of the parabolic section of
a cone. And Archimedes's servants were forced to hale him away from his
draughts, to be anointed in the bath; but he notwithstanding drew the
lines upon his belly with his strigil. And when, as he was washing
(as the story goes of him), he thought of a manner of computing the
proportion of gold in King Hiero's crown by seeing the water flowing
over the bathing-stool, he leaped up as one possessed or inspired,
crying, "I have found it;" which after he had several times repeated,
he went his way. But we never yet heard of a glutton that exclaimed
with such vehemence, "I have eaten," or of an amorous gallant that ever
cried, "I have kissed," among the many millions of dissolute debauchees