Though medicine and philosophy had many giants in ancient times, I say with Diego de Estella: “A dwarf standing on a giant’s shoulders may see farther than the giant himself.” I too may add something, alter something, and see farther than my predecessors. It is no more objectionable for me to write after others than for that famous physician Eliano Montalto to write On Diseases of the Head after Jason Pratensis, Heurnius, Hildesheim, and others. Many horses run in a race; one logician or rhetorician follows another. So make whatever objections you please: You may bark at me again and again and assail me with your vicious yelping.

That is my answer. As for those other faults—barbarous language, a rustic dialect, an improvised style, repetitions, monkey-like imitation, a patchwork of rags gathered from several dung heaps, authors’ excrement, trifles and fooleries tumbled out in confusion, without art, invention, judgement, intelligence, or learning; harsh, raw, rough, fanciful, absurd, insolent, indiscreet, badly composed, undigested, vain, scurrilous, idle, dull, and dry—I confess them all. Some are deliberate. You cannot think worse of me than I think of myself. It is not worth reading: I concede it. I ask you not to waste time reading so worthless a subject; perhaps I myself would be reluctant to read him or you writing in this way. It is “not worth the trouble.”

All I say is that I have precedents—what Isocrates calls “a refuge for those who do wrong”: others just as absurd, vain, idle, unlearned, and so on. “Some others have done the same.” Others have done as much, perhaps more, and perhaps you yourself: “We know, too, who did it to you,” and so on. We all have our faults; “we know, and this indulgence,” and so on. You judge me; I have judged others, and may judge you. “We yield in turn,” and so on. It is “the law of retaliation,” “something for something.” Go on, then: judge, criticize, mock, and rail.

Be as sharp-nosed a critic as you please—be all nose: you cannot say more against my trifles than I myself have said, and so on. Even if you were all scoffs and sneers, a very Momus, you could say nothing worse of us than we say ourselves. So, like women quarrelling, I have been first to cry “whore”; and I fear some will judge that I have gone too far. “Praising oneself is vain; blaming oneself is foolish.” Just as I will not overrate myself, I will not underrate myself. “I am not the first among you, nor the lowest.” I am neither one of the best nor one of the worst of you.

Though I may be an inch, so many feet, or so many parasangs behind this man or that, perhaps I am a little ahead of you. Let it be as it is, good or bad: I have made the attempt and put myself on stage. I must submit to judgement; I cannot escape it. It is quite true that “style reveals the man”: our style gives us away. As hunters find their quarry by its tracks, so a man’s character can be discerned in his works. “We judge people’s character much better from their speech than from their features”: that was old Cato’s rule. I have exposed myself in this treatise—I know it—turned myself inside out. I shall be criticized, no doubt, for, to tell the truth with Erasmus, “nothing is more captious than people’s judgements.” Nothing is so hard to please. Yet there is some comfort: “as tastes, so judgements.” Our judgements vary as much as our palates.

My three dinner guests seem almost to disagree, asking for very different things to suit their different palates, and so on. Our writings are so many dishes, our readers the guests. Our books are like beauty: what one admires, another rejects. Approval depends on the direction of each person’s taste. Books have their destinies according to the reader’s capacity. What most pleases one is “marjoram to a pig”—most disagreeable—to another. “As many people, so many opinions”: so many people, so many minds. What you condemn, he praises. What you ask for is certainly hateful and sour to the other two.

He values substance; you care only about words. He likes a loose, free style; you insist on polished composition, striking phrases, exaggerations, and allegories. He wants a fine frontispiece and enticing pictures to draw the reader’s attention, like the engravings in the Jesuit Jerónimo Nadal’s work on the Sunday Gospel readings. You reject these; what one admires, another shouts down as utterly absurd and ridiculous.

If it does not fit his taste, his method, and his ideas exactly—“if perhaps something he had in mind has been left out, if some expression,” and so on—if anything is omitted or added that he likes or dislikes, you are “an ill-read drudge,” an idiot, an ass; “you are nobody,” or “a plagiarist,” a trifler, a truant, an idle fellow. Otherwise it is a work of mere diligence, a collection without intelligence or invention, a mere trifle. “So everyone thinks things easy once they have been done, and no one thinks of the rough places when the road is paved.” This is how people are valued: their labours dismissed as worthless by fellows of no worth themselves. Who could not have done as much? “Everyone abounds in his own opinion.” Everyone has an opinion of his own; and while each person feels this way, how can anyone please them all?

What should I give, and what withhold? You refuse what he demands. How can I hope to express myself to suit everyone’s taste and ideas, or satisfy them all? Some understand too little, some too much. “They rush into reading books just as they rush into greeting people, considering not what they are like but what clothes they wear,” as Augustine observes. They care about who writes, not what is written. “The author’s celebrity gives an appetite.” They value the stamp on the metal rather than the metal itself. “They look at the cup, not at what is in it.”

If he is not rich, highly placed, polished and splendid, a great doctor, or loaded with grand titles, he is a dunce, however well qualified he may be. Yet, as Baronius says of Cardinal Caraffa’s works, anyone who rejects a man for his poverty is a mere hog. Some are too partial: friends think too highly of us; others arrive prejudiced, ready to carp, disparage, belittle, and mock—“who perhaps judge whatever comes from me with contempt beyond all contempt.” Some come like bees for honey, others like spiders to gather poison. What am I to do in such a case?