the trouble of bringing them up? So then, if you owe your beings to
wedlock, you owe that wedlock to this my follower, Madness; and what
you owe to me I have already told you. Again, she that has but once
tried what it is, would she, do you think, make a second venture if it
were not for my other companion, Oblivion? Nay, even Venus herself,
notwithstanding whatever Lucretius has said, would not deny but that
all her virtue were lame and fruitless without the help of my deity.
For out of that little, odd, ridiculous May-game came the supercilious
philosophers, in whose room have succeeded a kind of people the world
calls monks, cardinals, priests, and the most holy popes. And lastly,
all that rabble of the poets' gods, with which heaven is so thwacked
and thronged, that though it be of so vast an extent, they are hardly
able to crowd one by another.

But I think it is a small matter that you thus owe your beginning of life
to me, unless I also show you that whatever benefit you receive in the
progress of it is of my gift likewise. For what other is this? Can that
be called life where you take away pleasure? Oh! Do you like what I say?
I knew none of you could have so little wit, or so much folly, or wisdom
rather, as to be of any other opinion. For even the Stoics themselves
that so severely cried down pleasure did but handsomely dissemble, and
railed against it to the common people to no other end but that having
discouraged them from it, they might the more plentifully enjoy it
themselves. But tell me, by Jupiter, what part of man's life is that that
is not sad, crabbed, unpleasant, insipid, troublesome, unless it be
seasoned with pleasure, that is to say, folly? For the proof of which the
never sufficiently praised Sophocles in that his happy elegy of us, "To
know nothing is the only happiness," might be authority enough, but that
I intend to take every particular by itself.