in the first place to collect and lay up in store, as against a
siege, these other pleasures, as a sort of provision that will not
impair and decay; that then, after they have celebrated the
venereal festivals of life, 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