I dare undertake, Orlando
Furioso, or honest King Arthur, will never displease a soldier: but
the quiddity of "ens" and "prima materia" will hardly agree with a
corslet. And, therefore, as I said in the beginning, even Turks and
Tartars are delighted with poets. Homer, a Greek, flourished before
Greece flourished; and if to a slight conjecture a conjecture may be
opposed, truly it may seem, that as by him their learned men took
almost their first light of knowledge, so their active men receive
their first notions of courage. Only Alexander's example may serve,
who by Plutarch is accounted of such virtue that fortune was not his
guide but his footstool; whose acts speak for him, though Plutarch
did not; indeed, the phoenix of warlike princes. This Alexander
left his schoolmaster, living Aristotle, behind him, but took dead
Homer with him. He put the philosopher Callisthenes to death, for
his seeming philosophical, indeed mutinous, stubbornness; but the
chief thing he was ever heard to wish for was that Homer had been
alive. He well found he received more bravery of mind by the
pattern of Achilles, than by hearing the definition of fortitude.
And, therefore, if Cato misliked Fulvius for carrying Ennius with
him to the field, it may be answered that if Cato misliked it the
noble Fulvius liked it, or else he had not done it; for it was not
the excellent Cato Uticensis whose authority I would much more have
reverenced, but it was the former, in truth a bitter punisher of
faults, but else a man that had never sacrificed to the Graces.
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