Who, though wholly overcome by idleness or entangled in a labyrinth of worldly cares, troubles, and discontents, would not find the mind greatly lightened by reading some enticing story, true or invented? There, as in a mirror, one sees what our ancestors did: the beginnings, ruins, falls, and endings of commonwealths, and private people’s actions vividly displayed. Plutarch therefore calls such stories “second courses and sweetmeats”—the second course and delicacies—because they were usually read at noblemen’s feasts.

Who is not deeply moved by a passionate, well-written speech, an elegant poem, or some delightful, enchanting narrative like that of Heliodorus, “where a certain pleasure flows gently, joined with cheerfulness”? Julian the Apostate was so captivated by a speech of Libanius the sophist that, as he admits, he could not rest until he had read it all. “I read the greater part of your speech yesterday before my meal; after eating, I finished the whole without any interruption. What arguments! What composition!”

I may say the same of one delightful treatise or another, which carries the reader’s attention along with it. For most kinds of people, study is an extraordinary pleasure. What a world of books presents itself, on every subject, art, and science, to suit the reader’s capacity and give sweet contentment!

There are arithmetic, geometry, perspective, optics, astronomy, architecture, sculpture, and painting, on which so many elaborate treatises have lately appeared; mechanics and its secrets; military affairs, navigation, horsemanship, fencing, swimming, gardening, and planting; great volumes on agriculture, cookery, falconry, hunting, fishing, catching birds, and so forth, with exquisite pictures of every sport and game—what is there not?

Music, metaphysics, natural and moral philosophy, philology, politics, heraldry, genealogy, chronology, and the like supply great volumes; so do studies of antiquity. And “what is more subtle than arithmetical discoveries, more delightful than musical principles, more divine than astronomical ones, more exact than geometrical demonstrations?” What is so certain, what so pleasant?

Anyone who merely sees the geometrical tower of Garisenda at Bologna in Italy, or the spire and clock at Strasbourg, will admire what art can accomplish; or Archimedes’s device for moving the earth itself, if only he had somewhere to fix his instrument; Archimedes’s screw, ingenious devices for bringing streams together, musical instruments, and three-syllable echoes repeated again, again, and again, with countless other examples.

What immense volumes exist in law, medicine, and theology, for profit, pleasure, practice, and contemplation, in verse or prose! Their titles alone fill whole volumes. We have thousands of authors of every kind and many great, well-stocked libraries, like so many dishes of food served for different tastes; anyone moved by none of them is a complete blockhead.

Some take immense delight in studying the very languages in which these books are written: Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, Chaldean, Arabic, and so forth.

I think anyone would take pleasure in looking at a geographical map: “to draw the mind with sweet delight through the astonishing variety and charm of things, and awaken it to a fuller knowledge of them.” Regional and local depictions allow him, as it were, to behold all the distant provinces, towns, and cities of the world without ever leaving his study, measuring their extent and distance with a scale and compasses, and examining their situation.

Charlemagne, as Platina writes, had three beautiful silver tables. On the surface of one was a large map of Constantinople; on the second, a finely engraved Rome; on the third, an exquisite representation of the whole world. He took great delight in them. What greater pleasure can there be today than viewing those elaborate maps by Ortelius, Mercator, Hondius, and others, or examining the books of cities published by Braun and Hogenberg?

Or to read those exquisite descriptions by Maginus, Münster, Herrera, Laet, Merula, Botero, Leander Albertus, Camden, Leo Africanus, Adricomius, Nicholas Gerbelius, and others? Those famous expeditions of Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, Marco Polo the Venetian, Lod. Vertomannus, Aloysius Cadamustus, and the rest?

Those careful journals of Portuguese and Dutch travellers, of Bartison, Oliver à Nort, and others? Hakluyt’s voyages, Peter Martyr’s Decades, the accounts of Benzo, Lerius, and Linschoten; the travel narratives of Jod. a Meggen, Brocard the monk, Bredenbachius, Jo. Dublinius, Sandys, and others, to Jerusalem, Egypt, and other distant parts of the world? The delightful itineraries of Paulus Hentzerus, Iodocus Sincerus, Dux Polonus, and others? Or to read Bellonius’s observations and P. Gillius’s surveys; to see those parts of America represented in finely engraved pictures by the de Bry brothers?

Or to see a well-engraved herbal: herbs, trees, flowers, plants—all vegetation—depicted true to life in their natural colours, as in Matthiolus’s work on Dioscorides, or those of Delacampius, Lobel, and Bauhinus, and that recent, enormous herbal by Besler of Nuremberg, in which almost every plant is shown at its actual size?

Or to see birds, beasts, sea fish, spiders, gnats, serpents, flies, and all other creatures depicted by the same art, faithfully represented in vivid colours, with an exact account of their natures, powers, qualities, and so forth, as Aelian, Gesner, Ulisse Aldrovandi, Bellonius, Rondoletius, Hippolytus Salvianus, and others have carefully done? “To know the mysteries of heaven, the secrets of nature, and the order of the universe brings greater happiness and sweetness than anyone can grasp in thought, or any mortal hope for.”

What studies can be more pleasing than mathematics, whether theoretical or practical? Surveying land, making maps, models, sundials, and the like have always greatly delighted me. “Such is the beauty of mathematics,” says Plutarch, “that it is unworthy to compare with it those trappings and baubles of wealth, those girlish displays.” Such is the excellence of these studies that all those ornaments and childish bubbles of wealth are unworthy of comparison with them.