A horizontal ornamental band consisting of repeating interlaced knotwork or arabesque patterns.

THE PREFACE

Ornamental drop cap 'I' featuring foliate patterns and a central figure or face within the letter's structure.

Tramontani sempy.

I have diverse times weighed with myself from whence it should proceed that Italians and Spaniards, with other inhabitants beyond the Alps, should account Flemings, Englishmen, Scots, and other nations dwelling on this side, simple, uncircumspect, unwary, easy to be deceived, and circumvented by them. And the cause of my doubting was because I had perceived, by long experience in schools, both in Spain, Italy, France, and Flanders, that Flemings, Scots, and Englishmen were ever equal, and rather deeper scholars than either Italians or Spaniards, man for man. Whereunto we may add the proof of former ages, wherein all the world will confess that our nation has yielded as profound and learned schoolmen as any nation under the sun, in like quantity and proportion. For what country in any age did ever represent unto the world such venerable wits as England, by yielding our venerable Bede, who, born in a corner of the world, comprehended the whole world in his boundless apprehension and judgment? What age ever saw before our Alexander of Hales a divine more irrefragable in all his doctrine and opinions, the chief master of schoolmen, before England sent him into France? In what country ever appeared such a mirror of learning, of subtlety, of brevity, of perspicuity (in deepest matters, and unto worthy spirits) as when Scotus showed himself in the chair at Oxford? Whom for his worth, some other countries, with no less untruth than ambition, have claimed for theirs, and would have bereaved England of one of the worthies of the world. What might I not say of the Ockhams, of the Bacons, of the Middletons—in foreign nations more accounted of than prized at home—