DEDICATORY EPISTLE.

However, lest it play less piously under the jocular transformation of verses, by sprinkling hymnody with childish witticisms, or with Fescennine ribald/licentious meter: Your most religious character, worthy of all estimation not only among your own but also among outsiders, has forbidden it, Very Reverend Father.

Therefore, that most grave saying of the wisest King: Vanity of Vanities, once exposed in brief stanzas by a versified translation: Now, because it was to be the ingenuous material of innocent leisure, I have decided to augment it by half as much again, and in this way, increased with numbers metrical feet and illustrated with skillful icons of labor, I have resolved to dedicate it to You, the most perspicacious arbiter of my intention, out of filial effect; lest I be injurious to a most religious Father; or, while you were being reappointed as Provincial over the religious province of the Piarist Schools throughout Germany, I might be judged alienated from the filial cult of the dignity conferred upon your eminent merits.