and labour hard for it. So did Seneca, by his own admission in Letter 8: “Not a day do I spend idle. For part of the night I keep my eyes, tired with waking and now drooping into sleep, at their continual task.” Hear Cicero in For the Poet Archias: while others idled and took their pleasure, he was continually at his books. So do those who would be scholars, and at the risk, I say, of their health, fortunes, senses and lives.

How much did Aristotle and Ptolemy spend? “The price of a kingdom,” they say, more than a king’s ransom. How many crowns a year did they spend to perfect the sciences, one on his History of Animals, the other on his Almagest? How much time did Thabit ibn Qurra spend discovering the motion of the eighth sphere? Forty years and more, some write.

How many poor scholars have lost their senses or become fools, neglecting every worldly affair and their own health, wealth, “being and well-being,” to gain knowledge? After all their labour, the world’s reward is to call them ridiculous, foolish simpletons, idiots and asses; and, as often happens, to reject, despise and mock them as foolish and mad. Look for examples in Hildesheim, Gleanings, part 2, On Mania and Delirium; read Trincavelli, book 3, consultation 36 and chapter 17; Montanus, consultation 233; Garceus, On Judgements of Nativities, chapter 33; Mercurialis, consultation 86, chapter 25; and Prosper Calenius in his book On Black Bile. Go to Bedlam and ask.

Or if they keep their senses, they are still thought worthless fellows and fools because of their behaviour. After seven years of study—“he comes out more silent than a statue and usually shakes the people with laughter.”

Because they cannot ride a horse, which any country fellow can do, greet and court a gentlewoman, carve at table, bow and make polite salutations, which any common swaggerer can do—“the people laugh at them,” and so on—our fashionable gentlemen laugh them to scorn and reckon them simple fools. Indeed, such is their misery, they often deserve it: a mere scholar, a mere ass.

With head bent sideways and eyes fixed upon the ground, They gnaw their mutterings and furious silences alone, Weighing words upon an outstretched lip, Pondering an old sick man’s dreams: that nothing comes From nothing, and nothing can return to nothing.

Who lean their heads awry, Piercing the earth with a fixed eye; Who gnaw their muttering to themselves And furious silence, as if weighing Each word upon an outstretched lip; and who Ponder the dreams of old sick men: “From nothing, nothing can be brought, And what exists can never turn to nought.”

Thus they commonly go about meditating to themselves; thus they sit; such are their movements and gestures. Fulgosius, book 8, chapter 7, tells how Thomas Aquinas, dining with King Louis of France, suddenly struck the table with his fist and cried, “The argument against the Manichaeans is settled!” His mind was woolgathering, as they say, and his head was occupied with other matters. When he realized his mistake, he was deeply embarrassed.

Vitruvius tells such a story of Archimedes: having discovered how to determine how much gold was mixed with the silver in King Hiero’s crown, he ran naked from the bath crying “I have found it!”—I have found it. He was habitually so absorbed in his studies that he never noticed what went on around him. When the city was captured and soldiers were about to plunder his house, he took no notice. Saint Bernard rode all day beside the Lemnian lake and at last asked where he was: Marullus, book 2, chapter 4.

It was Democritus’s behaviour alone that made the people of Abdera suppose him mad and send for Hippocrates to cure him. In any solemn company, he would burst out laughing at every opportunity. Theophrastus says much the same of Heraclitus, because he wept continually, and Laertius of Menedemus Lampsacus, because he ran about like a madman, saying that he had come from hell as a spy to report to the devils what mortals did.

Your greatest students are commonly no better: foolish, ineffectual fellows in their outward behaviour, absurd and ridiculous to others, with no experience of worldly business. They can measure the heavens, range across the world and teach wisdom to others, yet every lowly tradesman outwits them in bargains and contracts. Are these men not fools? How could they be anything but so many school-bred dolts when, as he rightly observed, they neither hear nor see the things commonly done in the world outside? How are they to gain experience? By what means?

“I knew many scholars in my time,” says Aeneas Sylvius, in a letter to Gaspar Schlick, the emperor’s chancellor, “who were exceedingly learned, yet so uncouth and foolish that they lacked ordinary civility and did not know how to manage domestic or public affairs.” Paglarensis was astonished, and said that his farmer must have cheated him, when he heard that his sow had eleven piglets but his donkey only one foal.

To say the best of this profession, I can give no other testimony about them in general than Pliny gives of Isaeus: “He is still a scholar; no kind of men is so simple, so sincere, or better.” They are mostly harmless, honest, upright, innocent and plain-dealing men.