were, by rote, all he had heard, yet should never satisfy his inward
conceit, with being witness to itself of a true living knowledge;
but the same man, as soon as he might see those beasts well painted,
or that house well in model, should straightway grow, without need
of any description, to a judicial comprehending of them; so, no
doubt, the philosopher, with his learned definitions, be it of
virtue or vices, matters of public policy or private government,
replenisheth the memory with many infallible grounds of wisdom,
which, notwithstanding, lie dark before the imaginative and judging
power, if they be not illuminated or figured forth by the speaking
picture of poesy.

Tully taketh much pains, and many times not without poetical help,
to make us know the force love of our country hath in us. Let us
but hear old Anchises, speaking in the midst of Troy's flames, or
see Ulysses, in the fulness of all Calypso's delights, bewail his
absence from barren and beggarly Ithaca. Anger, the Stoics said,
was a short madness; let but Sophocles bring you Ajax on a stage,
killing or whipping sheep and oxen, thinking them the army of
Greeks, with their chieftains Agamemnon and Menelaus; and tell me,
if you have not a more familiar insight into anger, than finding in
the schoolmen his genus and difference? See whether wisdom and
temperance in Ulysses and Diomedes, valour in Achilles, friendship
in Nisus and Euryalus, even to an ignorant man, carry not an
apparent shining; and, contrarily, the remorse of conscience in
OEdipus; the soon-repenting pride in Agamemnon; the self-devouring
cruelty in his father Atreus; the violence of ambition in the two
Theban brothers; the sour sweetness of revenge in Medea; and, to
fall lower, the Terentian Gnatho, and our Chaucer's Pandar, so
expressed, that we now use their names to signify their trades; and