Nonius Marcellus: On the Propriety of Language

...I established the text, restoring most of the passages primarily from the authority of that excellent Victorinus manuscript, not a few from the most certain conjectures of learned men, and some from my own; with this limitation, however, that I only admitted those which did not stray far from the traces of the ancient script. In certain places, I exhibited the very blemishes of the old books, for I have always thought it safer to err in that direction. I have corrected countless passages from the authors themselves who have come down to us, and some also from a collation of other chapters in which they were repeated by Nonius himself, for there had been the utmost negligence by previous editors on both sides. I had committed the edition, thus constituted, to the printer Beysius twenty-eight years ago; but while he was on the point of beginning it, deterred by the onset of civil wars, he abandoned the plan and returned my papers to me. These, which I had saved beyond hope from the shipwreck of my library that perished during those rages, I kept hidden for a long time, entangled in other cares, partly domestic and partly public. Finally, as one age demands different customs, I had condemned them to eternal darkness, had not my friends intervened. Following their advice rather than my own, I revised those papers, which were almost buried in neglect, during this rural leisure. I also brought into consultation the manuscript codex of Isaac Casaubon, a man as excellent in every kind of learning as he was joined to me by the tightest bonds of friendship and all relations. Though he is by no means to be compared with Victorinus, yet A woodcut depicts a printer's mark or decorative cross-like symbol consisting of two vertical bars crossed by two horizontal bars.