the sound be deadened?--and why, when one would have set
up a bronze Alexander for a frontispiece to a stage at Pella, did the
architect advise to the contrary, because it would spoil the actors'
voices? and why, of the several kinds of music, will the chromatic
diffuse and the harmonic compose the mind? But now the several humors
of poets, their differing turns and forms of style, and the solutions
of their difficult places, have conjoined with a sort of dignity and
politeness somewhat also that is extremely agreeable and charming;
insomuch that to me they seem to do what was once said by Xenophon, to
make a man even forget the joys of love, so powerful and overcoming is
the pleasure they bring us.

In this investigation these gentlemen have not the least share, nor
do they so much as pretend or desire to have any. But while they are
sinking and depressing their contemplative part into the body, and
dragging it down by their sensual and intemperate appetites, as by so
many weights of lead, they make themselves appear little better than
hostlers or graziers that still ply their cattle with hay, straw, or
grass, looking upon such provender as the properest and meetest food
for them. And is it not even thus they would swill the mind with the
pleasures of the body, as hogherds do their swine, while they will
not allow it can be gay any longer than it is hoping, experiencing,
or remembering something that refers to the body; but will not have it
either to receive or seek for any congenial joy or satisfaction
from within itself? Though what can be more absurd and unreasonable
than--when there are two things that go to make up the man, a body and
a soul, and the soul besides hath the perogative of governing--that the
body should have its peculiar, natural, and proper good, and the soul
none at all, but must sit gazing at the body and simper at its passions,
as if she were pleased and affected with them, though indeed she be all
the while wholly untouched and unconcerned, as having nothing of her own
to choose, desire, or take delight in? For they should either pull off
the vizor quite, and say plainly that man is all body (as some of them
do, that take away all mental being), or, if they will allow us to have
two distinct natures, they should then leave to each its proper good and
evil, agreeable and disagreeable; as we find it to be with our senses,
each of which is peculiarly adapted to its own sensible, though they all
ver