“Reason is by study, labor, and exercise of logic, philosophy, and other liberal arts, corroborated and quickened, and the judgment–both in them and also in orators, laws, and stories–much ripened. And albeit poets be with many men taken but for painted words, yet do they much help the judgment, and make a man, among other things, well furnished of one special thing, without which all learning is half lame…a good mother wit.”

–St. Thomas More (Dialogue of Thomas More Knight, Book 1, Ch 23)