“Here in France,” Scaliger says, “everyone has permission to write, but few have the ability.” Learning was once honoured by discerning scholars; now noble fields of knowledge are debased by low, unlearned scribblers. They write out of vanity or need, to make money, or as parasites to flatter and ingratiate themselves with some powerful man, publishing “trifles, rubbish, and nonsense.”

Among so many thousands of authors, you will scarcely find one whose works make you any better by reading them; instead, they make you much worse: “by which one is infected rather than perfected,” corrupted rather than improved. Someone who reads such things— what has he learned, after all? What does he know but dreams and nonsense? So it often turns out, as Callimachus complained long ago, that a big book is a great evil.

Cardano criticizes the French and the Germans for their pointless scribbling: “I do not,” he says, “discourage them from publishing, provided that they discover something new.” He does not forbid them to write, so long as they produce a new invention of their own. But we keep weaving the same cloth, twisting the same rope again and again. Or, if the invention is new, it is merely some trinket or trifle, written by idle fellows for equally idle fellows to read. Who cannot invent something like that?

A man must have a barren imagination if he can produce nothing in this scribbling age. Princes display their armies, rich men boast of their buildings, soldiers of their courage, and scholars put their trifles on show: people must read them and listen to them, whether they want to or not.

Whatever he has once smeared on paper, he will long for everyone returning from the bakehouse and the fountain to know it, both boys and old women. Everyone must know what has been said and written, old women and children, coming and going.

What a crowd of poets this year has produced, as Pliny complains to Sosius Senecio: “This April someone or other has given a reading every day.” What a catalogue of new books our Frankfurt fairs and our fairs at home have produced this whole year—this whole age, I should say!

Twice a year, “new talents come forward and put themselves on display.” We stretch our minds and put them up for sale: “with great effort we accomplish nothing.” Unless there is a prompt reform of the kind Gesner so much desires, with princely decrees and responsible overseers to curb this freedom, it will go on “without end.”

“Who is such a ravenous devourer of books?” Who can read them all? We shall have—as we already do—a vast chaos and confusion of books. They overwhelm us; our eyes ache from reading and our fingers from turning the pages. For my part, I am one of the number, “we are just so many more”; I do not deny it. I have only this saying of Macrobius to offer in my defence: “All mine, nothing mine.” It is all mine, and none mine.

As a good housewife weaves one piece of cloth from several fleeces, and a bee gathers wax and honey from many flowers and makes a new bundle of it all: As bees sip from everything in flower-filled pastures— so I have laboriously collected this patchwork from various writers, and done so “without injury”: I have wronged no authors, but given everyone his due.

Jerome so highly praises this practice in Nepotian. He did not steal whole verses, pages, or treatises, as some do nowadays, concealing their authors’ names; he always said, this was Cyprian’s, that Lactantius’s, that Hilary’s; so said Minucius Felix, so Victorinus; thus far Arnobius. I name and quote my authors—a practice I must and will follow, however much some unlearned scribblers call it pedantic, to cloak their ignorance and because it clashes with their affected elegance. “I have borrowed, not stolen.”

And what Varro says of bees in On Agriculture, book 6—“entirely harmless, they damage no one’s work by taking from it”—I can say of myself: whom have I injured? The material is mostly theirs, and yet mine: “it is clear where it was taken from” (as Seneca approves), “yet it appears different from what it was taken from.” What nature does with our bodily food—incorporating, digesting, assimilating—I do too: “digest what I have swallowed,” arrange what I take.

I make them pay tribute to furnish this medley of mine; only the method is my own. I must appropriate Wecker’s saying, taken from Terence: “Nothing has been said that has not been said before; method alone reveals the craftsman.” We can say nothing that has not been said; only the arrangement and method are ours, and these reveal the scholar. Oribasius, Aesius, and Avicenna take everything from Galen, but arrange it in their own way: “with a different style, not a different fidelity.” Our poets steal from Homer: he vomits, Aelian says, and they lick it up. Theologians keep using Augustine’s words verbatim, and our reworkers of history do the same. Whoever comes last is usually best— until a later age and better fortune bring something greater.