PREFACE.

willing to proportion their style to the capacity of those to whom they write; likewise, they should not take it ill if I do the same; and if I have governed myself by this consideration, in order to dress these Latin passages in the French fashion original: "n'habiller à la Françoise ces passages Latins"; the author is explaining his decision to translate Latin citations into the vernacular for his readers, since they have no need to be understood by the common people populace: the general public, often used here to distinguish between scholars and unlearned readers, who are accustomed—when it comes to seeking the truth behind all these calumnies and false suspicions—to rely on the authority of Historians, Demonographers Demonographers: writers who study or document the nature and hierarchy of demons and spirits, and Authors of credit; who maintain the public in these delusions by their own agreement. And in truth, if everyone wished to follow the ardor of those spirits who would rather see a languid and skeletal period a "period" refers to a complex, formal sentence structure in their books than the name or authority of the Authors at whose expense they often compose them; what occasion would remain for us to labor for posterity? Seeing that, following this maxim, posterity would only use our works in imitation of the Rhodians The inhabitants of Rhodes were famously accused by ancient writers of recycling old statues by simply changing the heads and inscriptions to represent new figures, who did nothing but change the heads of old statues to make them serve for the representation of some other new-