EPISTLE.

as dearer friends; nor more recommended citizens; except those who by their writings try to benefit the public. Very careful, moreover, and a very pitiable advocate of the poor: a harsh and vehement defender of the weak, oppressed by the outrages and violences of the most powerful: of kind and easy access to those who have business with you: very vigilant, sober, gracious, and modest. But in warming myself thus after your virtues and merits, I do not notice, meanwhile, that you are a mortal enemy of praises: and even in your presence: and even to yourself; who perhaps would desire that in any event this came from an ink better gummed A metaphor for a more refined or permanent literary style than mine is. Also, it is not to you that I speak; but to the public, to whom I present here this labor under your learned and happy name. PHILOSTRATUS then (gentlemen) is a Greek author, a Sophiste Sophist by profession; that is to say, of the number of those who studied to speak well; but more daintily than the common form of prose allows, even to the point of showing themselves a little affected. It is now nearly fourteen hundred years since this excellent personage flourished, of very great renown in Greece and Italy; as much for his singular erudition, as for the elegance of his style, elaborated to the parangon comparison or model of that of the Poets; if by chance it is no longer so, at least more than many among them: under such happy and favorable constellations were these souls incorporated; to have had from their destiny, or rather from the beneficence of their Creator, such a long vogue and duration through all parts of the earth. And certainly their country and their language owe much to their labors: for by reason of the pleasure and utility found therein, all manners of nations, even to the most distant and savage, have taken pains to know and learn it. And they, on the other hand, are well indebted