And put the case, that in the literal sense you meet with purposes merry and solacious enough, and consequently very correspondent to their inscriptions, yet must not you stop there as at the melody of the charming syrens, but endeavour to interpret that in a sublimer sense which possibly you intended to have spoken in the jollity of your heart.  Did you ever pick the lock of a cupboard to steal a bottle of wine out of it?  Tell me truly, and, if you did, call to mind the countenance which then you had.  Or, did you ever see a dog with a marrowbone in his mouth,—­the beast of all other, says Plato, lib. 2, de Republica, the most philosophical?  If you have seen him, you might have remarked with what devotion and circumspectness he wards and watcheth it:  with what care he keeps it:  how fervently he holds it:  how prudently he gobbets it:  with what affection he breaks it:  and with what diligence he sucks it.  To what end all this?  What moveth him to take all these pains?  What are the hopes of his labour?  What doth he expect to reap thereby?  Nothing but a little marrow.  True it is, that this little is more savoury and delicious than the great quantities of other sorts of meat, because the marrow (as Galen testifieth, 5. facult. nat. & 11. de usu partium) is a nourishment most perfectly elaboured by nature.

In imitation of this dog, it becomes you to be wise, to smell, feel and have in estimation these fair goodly books, stuffed with high conceptions, which, though seemingly easy in the pursuit, are in the cope and encounter somewhat difficult.  And then, like him, you must, by a sedulous lecture, and frequent meditation, break the bone, and suck out the marrow,—­that is, my allegorical sense, or the things I to myself propose to be signified by these Pythagorical symbols, with assured hope, that in so doing you will at last attain to be both well-advised and valiant by the reading of them:  for in the perusal of this treatise you shall find another kind of taste, and a doctrine of a more profound and abstruse consideration, which will disclose unto you the most glorious sacraments and dreadful mysteries, as well in what concerneth your religion, as matters of the public state, and life economical.

Do you believe, upon your conscience, that Homer, whilst he was a-couching his Iliads and Odysses, had any thought upon those allegories, which Plutarch, Heraclides Ponticus, Eustathius, Cornutus squeezed out of him, and which Politian filched again from them?  If you trust it, with neither hand nor foot do you come near to my opinion, which judgeth them to have been as little dreamed of by Homer, as the Gospel sacraments were by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, though a certain gulligut friar (Frere Lubin croquelardon.) and true bacon-picker would have undertaken to prove it, if perhaps he had met with as very fools as himself, (and as the proverb says) a lid worthy of such a kettle.