If you arrive at an inn in Germany and dislike the food, meals, lodging, and so on, a German innkeeper replies gruffly, “Find yourself another inn.” If you do not like this one, go elsewhere. That is my decision: if you do not like my writing, read something else. I do not greatly value your judgement; do as you please. The outcome depends on neither your wishes nor mine. When we have both had our say, what Pliny the Younger says to Trajan will prove true: not everyone’s intellectual work succeeds; it needs suitable material, a subject, an occasion, and some influential person to recommend it.

If you and others like you criticize and shout me down, perhaps others will approve and praise me; some already have—“I speak from experience.” I may truly say with Giovio in a similar case—“let there be no boasting in the words”—“through it I have earned the intimacy and friendship of certain great men, pontiffs, and noblemen, their welcome thanks, and the praises of many who are themselves well praised.” Just as some worthy men have honoured me, others have disparaged me and will do so again.

Of this book’s first publication I may apply, in some measure, what Probus says of Persius’s satires: “As soon as the book was published, people began to admire it and snatch it up eagerly.” The first, second, and third editions quickly sold out and were eagerly read; yet, as I have said, some praised them less warmly than others scornfully rejected them. That was Democritus’s fortune too: “the same man was an object of admiration and ridicule.” It was also the fate of Seneca, that overseer of intelligence, learning, and judgement, “learned to an astonishing degree,” the best of Greek and Latin writers in Plutarch’s opinion;

that “renowned corrector of vice,” as Quintilian calls him, and painstaking philosopher of universal learning, who wrote so excellently and admirably, could not please everyone or escape criticism. How he is disparaged by Caligula, Aulus Gellius, Quintilian, and even Lipsius, his chief defender! “Much in him is harmful,” says that same Quintilian. He has many childish passages and sayings, “unpolished language,” often too careless and slack, as Gellius observes: “commonplace, worn-out expression; smart but foolish sayings; ordinary learning”—a plain, shallow writer, such as he is.

“In places he has thorns and tedious passages,” says Lipsius; and, as in all his other works, especially in his letters, “some are occupied with subtleties and foolishness”; “in places he is tangled and poorly arranged”; “he did this without an abundance of material.” He jumbles many things together without method, in the Stoic fashion: “he arranged little and piled up much,” and so on. If Seneca is whipped like this, and many famous men I could name, what should I expect? How can I, “scarcely the shadow of so great a philosopher,” hope to please? No one is so perfect, Erasmus holds, as to satisfy everyone, unless antiquity, established authority, and so on bar criticism. But, as I have shown with Seneca, even this does not always work. How shall I escape?

It is every writer’s common sentence; I must, I say, endure it. I do not seek applause: “I do not hunt the votes of the fickle crowd.” Yet again, “I am not so ugly”: I would not be disparaged. I shall be praised enough if you, reader, do not scorn me. I fear the judgement of good people and submit my labours to their favourable reception; “and I despise the tongues of slaves.” Like a dog’s barking, I calmly despise the malicious, scurrilous abuse, sneers, and slanders of those who rail and detract; I scorn the rest. What I have said, therefore, I have said “according to my limited ability.”

There are still one or two things about my treatment of this subject that I wished to amend if I could. For these I must apologize, “beg indulgence,” and, on further consideration, give the friendly reader notice. I did not intend to prostitute my muse in English or disclose “Minerva’s secrets,” but to publish this in a shorter Latin form, if I could have had it printed. Any scurrilous pamphlet in English is welcome to our money-minded booksellers; they print everything— and hammer out little books on whose pages scarcely a naked ape would shit.

But they will not deal in Latin. Nicholas Carr, in his oration on the scarcity of English writers, gives this as one reason why so many flourishing minds in our country are smothered in oblivion, lying dead and buried. Another major fault is that I have not revised the manuscript and improved its style, which now flows carelessly, just as it first came to me; my available time did not allow it. “I did neither what I could nor what I wished.” I admit it is neither as I would like it nor as it should be. When I reread it, I am ashamed to have written it, for I see much that even in my own judgement deserved erasure. When I read through this treatise I have written, I am ashamed, and find much in it unfit.

“And, most seriously,” there are many things in the substance itself that I now disapprove of, though I did not when I wrote them: “my age is not the same, nor my mind.” I would willingly retract much, and so on, but it is too late. I can only ask pardon now for what is wrong. Had I acted wisely, I might indeed have followed the poet’s rule— and let it be kept back until the ninth year— and taken greater care. Or, as the physician Alexander required lapis lazuli to be washed fifty times before use, I should have revised, corrected, and improved this treatise. But, as I said, I lacked that fortunate leisure: I had no copyists or assistants.