and that--

"Magis magnos clericos non sunt magis magnos sapientes."

["The greatest clerks are not the wisest men." A proverb given in
Rabelais' Gargantua, i. 39.]

But whence it should come to pass, that a mind enriched with the
knowledge of so many things should not become more quick and sprightly,
and that a gross and vulgar understanding should lodge within it, without
correcting and improving itself, all the discourses and judgments of the
greatest minds the world ever had, I am yet to seek. To admit so many
foreign conceptions, so great, and so high fancies, it is necessary (as a
young lady, one of the greatest princesses of the kingdom, said to me
once, speaking of a certain person) that a man's own brain must be
crowded and squeezed together into a less compass, to make room for the
others; I should be apt to conclude, that as plants are suffocated and
drowned with too much nourishment, and lamps with too much oil, so with
too much study and matter is the active part of the understanding which,
being embarrassed, and confounded with a great diversity of things, loses
the force and power to disengage itself, and by the pressure of this
weight, is bowed, subjected, and doubled up. But it is quite otherwise;
for our soul stretches and dilates itself proportionably as it fills; and
in the examples of elder times, we see, quite contrary, men very proper
for public business, great captains, and great statesmen very learned
withal.

And, as to the philosophers, a sort of men remote from all public
affairs, they have been sometimes also despised by the comic liberty of
their times; their opinions and manners making them appear, to men of