they may spend a cleanly after-feast in reading over the
historians and poets, or else in problems of music and geometry. For
it would never have come into their minds so much as to think of these
purblind and toothless gropings and spurtings of lechery, had they but
learned, if nothing more, to write comments upon Homer or Euripides, as
Aristotle, Heraclides, and Dicaerchus did. But I verily persuade myself
that their neglecting to take care for such provisions as these, and
finding all the other things they employed themselves in (as they use to
say of virtue) but insipid and dry, and being wholly set upon pleasure,
and the body no longer supplying them with it, give them occasion to
stoop to do things both mean and shameful in themselves and unbecoming
their age; as well when they refresh their memories with their former
pleasures and serve themselves of old ones (as it were) long since dead
and laid up in pickle for the purpose, when they cannot have fresh ones,
as when again they offer violence to nature by suscitating and inflaming
in their decayed bodies, as in cold embers, other new ones equally
senseless, they having not, it seems, their minds stored with any
congenial pleasure that is worth the rejoicing at.

As to the other delights of the mind, we have already treated of them,
as they occurred to us. But their aversedness and dislike to music,
that affords us so great delights and such charming satisfactions, a
man could not forget if he would, by reason of the inconsistency of what
Epicurus saith, when he pronounceth in his book called his Doubts that
his wise man ought to be a lover of public spectacles and to delight
above any other man in the music and shows of the Bacchanals; and yet
he will not admit of music problems or of the critical inquiries of
philologists, no, not so much as at a compotation. Yea, he advises such
princes as are lovers of the Muses rather to entertain themselves at
their feasts either with some narration of military adventures or with
the importune scurrilities of drolls and buffoons, than to engage in
disputes about music or in questions of poetry. For this very thing he
had the face to write in his treatise of Monarchy, as if he were writing
to Sardanapalus, or to Nanarus ruler of Babylon. For neither would a
Hiero nor an Attalus nor an Archelaus be persuaded to make a Euripides,
a Simonides, a Melanippides, a Crates, or a Diodotus rise up from their
tables, and to place such s