Of Study

Editor's note: Reading is enough for pleasure, enough for learning, and enough for developing talents. His joyful mood is most seen when he is alone in seclusion; his eruditeness is most seen when he talks loudly; his talent is most seen when he is dealing with things. Reading history makes people wise, reading poetry makes people smart, mathematics makes people thoughtful, science makes people profound, ethics makes people solemn, and logic and rhetoric make people good at discerning: everything learned becomes character.

Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight, is in privacy and retiring; for ornament, is in discourse; and for ability, is in the judgment, and disposition of business. sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humor of a scholar. They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience: for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need proyning, by study; and studies themselves, do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience. them, won by observation. Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; would be only in the less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books, else distilled books are like common distilled waters, flashy things.

Reading make a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit: and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know, that he doth not. Abeunt studia in mores. Nay, there is no stand or impediment in the wit, but may be wrought out by fit studies; like as diseases of the body, may have appropriate exercises. Bowling is good for the stone and reins; shooting for the lungs and breast; gentle walking for the stomach; riding for the head; again. If his wit be not apt to distinguish or find differences, let him study the Schoolmen; for they are cymini sectors. If he be not apt to beat over matters, and to call up one thing to prove and illustrate another, let him study the lawyers' cases. So every defect of the mind, may have a special receipt.