D E D I C A T I O

men are fruit-bearing, and from an ancient discipline, estimate the dignity of the arts solely from public utility and necessity. If they wished to reflect on what position they themselves would hold in the republic they are building, and in what way their work would be useful to their fellow citizens, they would perhaps concern themselves less with new things. For this reasoning would overturn not only the arts and disciplines, but republics, and the entire state of the globe. For, as the good Columella a Roman writer on agriculture once rightly said in defense of his art, Without playful arts, and even without lawyers (there is no need to say how many and whom he could add) cities were once sufficiently happy and will be so in the future: but it is manifest that without farmers mortals can neither subsist nor be fed.

But, they say, other studies either have some utility, or at least a certain ingenuous delight: this has neither. They are very much mistaken. Whatever there is in the whole of learning of utility or pleasure, criticism claims by its own right that it is all referred back to itself, since the knowledge of antiquity depends entirely upon it, and to it we owe whatever books of the ancients exist no less than to their authors themselves; which, had it not been for critics, we would not have read, but instead would have had the errors and commentaries of stupid scribes, just as no one ever understood, nor will be able to understand, unless he has either learned criticism, or, due to the excellent magnitude of his talent, being a critic born, has had no need to learn it. Without which art, or rather faculty, if anyone thinks that something great can be done in literature, he should believe the same can be done in common life without judgment, which is criticism, or in a republic without sagacity, which is its perfection, and the goal of human genius.