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But we find ourselves in one and the same ecstasy with Eudoxus, Archimedes, and Hipparchus; and we readily give assent to Plato when he saith of the mathematics, that while ignorance and unskilledness make men despise them, they still thrive notwithstanding by reason of their charmingness, in despite of contempt.
'Well, you are a very mysterious pair, and a very charming one. 'So we think ourselves as to the charmingness. . . . and as for the mystery . . . "Omnia exeunt in mysterium," says somebody, somewhere- -or if he don't, ought to, seeing that it is so.
And when the lovers of the art of painting are so enamoured with the charmingness of their own performances, that Nicias, as he was drawing the Evocation of Ghosts in Homer, often asked his servants whether he had dined or no, and when King Ptolemy had sent him threescore talents for his piece, after it was finished, he neither would accept the money nor part with his work; what and how great satisfactions may we then suppose to have been reaped from geometry and astronomy by Euclid when he wrote his Dioptrics, by Philippus when he had perfected his demonstration of the figure of the moon, by Archimedes when with the help of a certain angle he had found the sun's diameter to make the same part of the largest circle that that angle made of four right angles, and by Apollonius and Aristarchus who were the inventors of some other things of the like nature?
Orlando's good-natured giant weeps even for the death of the scoundrel Margutte; and the awful hero himself, at whose death nature is convulsed and the heavens open, begs his dying horse to forgive him if ever he has wronged it. A charm of another sort in Pulci, and yet in most instances, perhaps, owing the best part of its charmingness to its being connected with the same feeling, is his wit.
But we are nothing put out of countenance, either by the beauteous gayety of the colors, or by the charmingness of the musical voices, or by the rare sagacity of the intellects, or by the cleanliness and neatness of diet, or by the rare discretion and prudence of these poor unfortunate animals; but for the sake of some little mouthful of flesh, we deprive a soul of the sun and light, and of that proportion of life and time it had been born into the world to enjoy.
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