Nine Books on the Dignity and Advancement of Learning

Anyone other than you, MY LORD, would be quite satisfied to have this shortened tableau of all the riches of the Soul presented to them. However, I have reason to fear that the general knowledge you possess of everything that has transpired among us and among foreigners might lead you to place little value on this first part. That the second might be found to be below the liveliness of your spirit. And that your natural lights have anticipated everything that our Philosophy could teach you. But the matter is very beautiful in itself, and perhaps you will take pleasure in examining it, in order to recognize therein the strong and the weak. I dare hope so, at least if it happens that you might attach yourself to the reading of the example of Parabolic Philosophy a method of teaching through fables or allegories treated in this Book, on the subject of Policy civil administration/governance: where I very humbly beseech you, MY LORD, to admire how you have known how to valiantly execute in war everything prescribed in this Moral teaching. And I am certain that I shall not be the only one who, meditating on this subject, will say that the day of Saint Ambrose likely referring to a specific military engagement should make you named the French Perseus; because of the promptness that you brought to this important enterprise; and for the happy outcome that this remarkable combat had: where the horse upon which you were mounted was wounded in four places; and from this blood (to speak with the fable) there should have been engendered Pegasus the winged horse of Greek mythology, rather than from that of Medusa; who in the natural order was less fit for such generation.

The third contains principally the treatise of the high and the first Philosophy, which my Author names Sapience Wisdom, which embraces the knowledge of divine and human things, and all its dependencies which are of a