For hawking and hunting are very strenuous, involving much riding and many dangers; fishing is still and quiet. Even if the angler catches no fish, he has a healthy walk to the brookside, pleasant shade beside the lovely silver streams, good air, and the sweet scents of fresh meadow flowers. He hears the birds’ melodious harmony and sees swans, herons, ducks, moorhens, coots, and many other birds with their young. He thinks this better than the noise of hounds, the blast of horns, and all the sport they can provide.

There are many other sports and recreations in common use, such as bell-ringing, bowls, and archery, which Ascham recommends in a whole volume. In former times archery was required by statute as an exercise for defence and an honour to our country, as our victories in France may well testify. Skittles, trunks, quoits, throwing bars, hurling, wrestling, jumping, running, fencing, military drill, swimming, practice swords, foils, football, balloon ball, quintain, and many similar pastimes are the usual recreations of country people.

Riding great horses, tilting at rings, jousts and tournaments, horse races, and wild-goose chases are the sports of men of higher rank, and good in themselves, though many gentlemen by these means gallop right out of their fortunes.

But the pleasantest of all outdoor pastimes is the one Aretaeus recommends, “walking through delightful places”: making a little tour, a cheerful journey now and then with good companions, to visit friends and see cities, castles, and towns.

Often to visit clear rivers and lovely Tempe, And seek gentle breezes on the mountain heights.

To see the pleasant fields and crystal springs, And breathe the gentle air among the mountains.

To walk among orchards, gardens, bowers, raised mounds and arbours, planted wildernesses, green thickets, arches, groves, lawns, little streams, fountains, and other delightful places, like Daphne near Antioch; among brooks, pools, and fishponds, between wood and water, in a fine meadow beside a river, “where there are varied birdsongs, colours of flowers, and shrubs in the meadows,” and so forth; to amuse oneself in some pleasant open ground or park, sometimes run up a steep hill, or sit in a shady place: all this must be delightful recreation.

“The prince’s garden and a house built for pleasure, with a wood, a mound, and a fishpond, commonly called La Montagna”: Schottus highly praises the prince’s garden at Ferrara, with its groves, hills, and ponds, for its delightful view; it pleased him greatly. To his eyes, a Persian paradise, or pleasure park, could not be more delightful. St Bernard, in the description of his monastery, is almost enraptured by its pleasures.

A sick man, he says, sits on a grassy bank; and when the Dog Star scorches the plains and dries up rivers, he lies in a shady bower: “beneath a tree’s foliage he tempers the burning stars.” He feeds his eyes on varied sights, herbs and trees, to console him in his misery; he receives many delightful scents, and fills his ears with the sweet and varied harmony of birds. “Good God,” he says, “what a multitude of pleasures you have made for mankind!”

Anyone suddenly admitted to see such a palace as the Escorial in Spain, or the one the Moors built at Granada, Fontainebleau in France, or the Turkish sultan’s gardens in his seraglio, where all kinds of birds and beasts are kept for pleasure—wolves, bears, lynxes, tigers, lions, elephants, and so on—or the gardens on the banks of the Thracian Bosporus; the pope’s Belvedere in Rome, as delightful as the hanging gardens of Babylon; the Indian king’s delightful garden in Aelian; those famous gardens of Lord Cantelow in France; or many of our noblemen’s gardens at home: however unhappy he might be, he could not help being greatly refreshed for a time.

To take a boat on a pleasant evening and row upon the water with music, as Plutarch so warmly praises and Aelian admires on the river Peneus, among those Thessalian fields bordered with green laurels, where birds sing so sweetly that travellers, as though enchanted by their heavenly music, “forget all labours and cares”—at once forgetting every labour, care, and grief—or to travel by gondola along the Grand Canal in Venice to see those splendid palaces, must surely refresh and bring contentment to a dull, melancholy spirit.

Or to see the inner rooms of a finely built, sumptuous building, such as the Persian kings’ palace so celebrated by Diodorus and Curtius, where almost everything was beaten gold: chairs, stools, thrones, canopies, and pillars of gold; plane trees and vines of gold; grapes made of precious stones; all the other ornaments of pure gold—

Jewels glitter on the couches, and furnishings glow with jasper; Coverings gleam with Tyrian purple …

With sweet scents and perfumes, fine wines, sumptuous food, and so forth; besides the handsomest young men and most beautiful maidens, “pretty girls serving,” the rarest beauties the world could supply, dressed in costly and elaborate clothes “to the astonishment of the spectators”; with exquisite music, as in Trimalchio’s house, sweet voices sounding in every room throughout the day and night: “incomparable luxury,” every delight and pleasure of every kind that could possibly be devised or obtained to please the senses, “guests crowned with garlands, drunk with delights,” and so forth.

In Homer, Telemachus is presented as almost enraptured by the sight of Menelaus’s magnificent palace and rich furnishings, when he beheld