EPISTLE.

I suspect) that holds much of the Asiatic a rich, ornate, and redundant rhetorical style; having loaded and reloaded it with so many synonyms and sayings signifying only the same thing, that it overflows. But here is what I respond: That one cannot rightly condemn as a fault or error what is done deliberately and by choice; until one has first understood the reasons for it. For this overgrowth and superfluity of words that one might want to tax in what is of my own growth: this long tail and trailing of words strung together uselessly, was put by me entirely on purpose; so that among such a copy abundance or supply, the youth may choose and draw what will come most appropriately to them: just as to make some exquisite salad, the Greengrocer provides himself with a large basket of herbs, of which he afterwards wishes to take only the eye, only the most delicate part; the heart, the sprout, and the tender shoots: it being, moreover, much easier and more convenient to trim from a garment that is too large, than to add to it if it is meager. Therefore instead of giving me blame, one should say great thanks to me, since to benefit others I have displeased myself. For in what would proceed purely from my own forge, I would wish to restrict myself much more; and (if I dare say it so) Thucydidize to write with the brevity and density of the historian Thucydides more: pruning, thinning, and cutting away all this vain and idle shoot. And as for the words already a bit passed and withered, which I have inserted sometimes here and there, though very rarely; it was not at all out of necessity or scarcity, nor by constraint either, but only out of a gaiety of heart: because I consider it a very reasonable thing to leave some place for antiquity: there being, as our author himself says, I know not what grace and beauty in the first wrinkles. In fact, the court of a great Prince could not be better adorned than to always see there some hoary beards, some venerable old knights*