charming fashion of speech, or that where a fictitious but
becoming subject is handled, natural or historical truth is
pursued under the guise of allegorical fiction.

Although it is true that all men naturally desire knowledge, yet
they do not all take the same pleasure in learning. On the
contrary, when they have experienced the labour of study and find
their senses wearied, most men inconsiderately fling away the
nut, before they have broken the shell and reached the kernel.
For man is naturally fond of two things, namely, freedom from
control and some pleasure in his activity; for which reason no
one without reason submits himself to the control of others, or
willingly engages in any tedious task. For pleasure crowns
activity, as beauty is a crown to youth, as Aristotle truly
asserts in the tenth book of the Ethics. Accordingly the wisdom
of the ancients devised a remedy by which to entice the wanton
minds of men by a kind of pious fraud, the delicate Minerva
secretly lurking beneath the mask of pleasure. We are wont to
allure children by rewards, that they may cheerfully learn what
we force them to study even though they are unwilling. For our
fallen nature does not tend to virtue with the same enthusiasm
with which it rushes into vice. Horace has expressed this for us
in a brief verse of the Ars Poetica, where he says:

All poets sing to profit or delight.

And he has plainly intimated the same thing in another verse of
the same book, where he says:

He hits the mark, who mingles joy with use.