LETTERS FROM THE CABALA. 89 



achieved. A.nd this I write, with no dislike of increasing 

 our knowledge with new-found devices, (which is undoubt 

 edly a practice of high commendation) in regard of the 

 benefit they will yield for the present, that the world hath 

 ever been, and will for ever continue, very full of such 

 devisers ; whose industry that way hath been very obstinate 

 and eminent, and hath produced strange effects, above the 

 reach and the hope of men s common capacities ; and yet 

 our notions and theorems have always kept in grace both 

 with them, and with the rarest that ever were named among 

 the learned. 



By this you see to what boldness I am brought by your 

 kindness ; that (if I seem to be too saucy in this contradic 

 tion) it is the opinion that I hold of your noble disposition, 

 and of the freedom in these cases, that you will afford your 

 special friend, that hath induced me to it. And although I 

 myself, like a carrier s horse, cannot balk the beaten way, 

 in which I have been trained, yet since it is my censure of 

 your Cogitata that I must tell you, to be plain, you have very 

 much wronged yourself and the world, to smother such a 

 treasure so long in your coffer: for though I stand well 

 assured (for the tenor and subject of your main discourse) 

 you are notable to impanel a jury in any university that will 

 give up a verdict to acquit you of error ; yet it cannot be 

 gainsaid, that all your treatise over doth abound with choice 

 conceit of the present state of learning, and with so worthy 

 contemplations of the means to procure it, as may persuade 

 with any student to look more narrowly to his business, not 

 only by aspiring to the greatest perfection, of that which is 

 now-a-days divulged in the sciences, but by diving yet 

 deeper, as it were, into the bowels and secrets of nature, 

 and by enforcing of the powers of his judgment and wit to 

 learn of St. Paul, &quot; Consectari meliora dona:&quot; which course, 

 would to God (to whisper so much into your ear) you had 

 followed at the first, when you fell to the study of such a 



