DEDICATORY LETTER

...Your Highnesses, in accordance with the respect of my most devoted soul, so that I might at least declare some attempt at gratitude for the favors bestowed upon me by some testimony. Others have been accustomed, when they dedicate their scholarly labors original: "lucubrationes," literally "work done by lamplight," implying diligent study to Princes and Great Men, to concern themselves primarily with weaving their genealogies, recounting their praises and their brilliant and heroic deeds in an elegant style of writing, and—as the saying goes—proclaiming them with the "fullest trumpets" original: "plenissimis tubis," a rhetorical metaphor for loud, public, or ostentatious praise, raising and extolling them even to the stars. I, however, knowing that Your Highnesses find anything inflated or turgid with boastful fame to be distasteful—especially since that glorious and memorable excellence of yours, combined with great-souled generosity magnanima munificentia: the classical virtue of "magnanimity" (greatness of soul) expressed through lavish and noble giving, has flourished through the ages of so many centuries in the most August House of Brunswick—