GIORDANO BRUNO OF NOLA

PHILOTHEUS. What pleases me about this author is that he does not count himself among that flock who, gathering the opinions of others from here and there into a single collection, enroll themselves in the number of authors laboring for posterity—seeking to achieve immortality at the expense of others. For the most part, they set themselves up as teachers of those very subjects of which they have absolutely no understanding or logic. And many times they cannot help but break out into their own natural voice (after they have somehow fitted the lion's skin A reference to Aesop's fable where a donkey wears a lion's skin to appear powerful to themselves from the discoveries of others). This happens most often when they eject something from their own "feeble Mars" original: "delumbi Marte" — meaning weak or emasculated creative effort (because it is easy to add to things already discovered) or when they pour forth from the poverty of their own stupid senses. Those, those are the battering rams of infancy, the engines of error, the cannons of absurdity, and the thunders, flashes, lightnings, and great storms of ignorance.

LOGIFER. Do you not feel the same about our "law-makers of song" and versifiers, who sell themselves to us as poets by using the inventions, half-lines, and full verses of others as their own?

PHILOTHEUS. Leave the poets be. For just as we know that "kings have long hands" A classical proverb meaning rulers have far-reaching power depending on the place, so too poets are accustomed to having deep and far-reaching voices depending on the place and time.

LOGIFER. I spoke of versifiers, not poets.

PHILOTHEUS. Well said; therefore few, or perhaps no one, will think your words were directed at them. But what does this...