I.
While I ruminated these things with myself, and determined to set forth my woful complaint in writing, methought I saw a woman stand above my head, having a grave countenance, glistening clear eye, and of quicker sight than commonly Nature doth afford; her colour fresh and bespeaking unabated vigour, and yet discovering so many years, that she could not at all be thought to belong to our times; her stature uncertain and doubtful, for sometime she exceeded not the common height of men, and sometime she seemed to touch the heavens with her head, and if she lifted it up to the highest, she pierced the very heavens, so that she could not be seen by the beholders; her garments were made of most fine threads with cunning workmanship into an ever-during stuff, which (as I knew afterward by her own report) she had woven with her own hands. A certain duskishness caused by negligence and time had darkened their colour, as it is wont to happen when pictures stand in a smoky room. In the lower part of them was placed the Greek letter [Greek: PI], and in the upper [Greek: THETA],[80] and betwixt the two letters, in the manner of stairs, there were certain degrees made, by which there was a passage from the lower to the higher letter: this her garment had been cut by the violence of some, who had taken away such pieces as they could get. In her right hand she had certain books, and in her left hand she held a sceptre.
This woman, seeing the poetical Muses standing about my bed, and suggesting words to my tears, being moved for a little space, and inflamed with angry looks: "Who," saith she, "hath permitted these tragical harlots to have access to this sick man, which will not only not comfort his grief with wholesome remedies, but also nourish them with sugared poison? For these be they which with the fruitless thorns of affections do kill the fruitful crop of reason, and do accustom men's minds to sickness, instead of curing them. But if your flattery did deprive us of some profane fellow,[81] as commonly it happeneth, I should think that it were not so grievously to be taken, for in him our labours should receive no harm. But now have you laid hold of him who hath been brought up in Eleatical and Academical studies?[82] Rather get you gone, you Sirens pleasant even to destruction, and leave him to my Muses to be cured and healed."
That company being thus checked, overcome with grief, casting their eyes upon the ground, and betraying their bashfulness with blushing, went sadly away. But I, whose sight was dimmed with tears, so that I could not discern what this woman might be, so imperious, and of such authority, was astonished, and, fixing my countenance upon the earth, began to expect with silence what she would do afterward. Then she coming nigher, sat down at my bed's feet, and beholding my countenance sad with mourning, and cast upon the ground with grief, complained of the perturbation of my mind with these verses.
[80] Cf. "est enim philosophia genus, species uero eius duae, una quae [Greek: theoraetikae] dicitur, altera quae [Greek: praktikae], id est speculatiua et actiua." Boeth. In Porph. Dial. i.
[81] This scorn of the profanum vulgus appears again and again in the theological tractates, e.g. Tr. iii. (supra, p. 4), Tr. v. (supra, p. 74).
[82] Zeno of Elea invented Dialectic: Plato was the first to lecture on philosophy in the gymnasium of the Academia.