Vita clarissimi viri D. Iosiae Simleri Tigurini, S. Theologiae in Schola Tigurina Professoris fidelissimi

by which errors and superstitions can be more easily and commodiously refuted than by this very thing (as Cicero very cleverly calls it), the witness of times, the light of truth, the life of memory, the mistress of life, the messenger of antiquity. Furthermore, these are the historical writings of our Simler: Three descriptions of the life, origin, and death of three most excellent lights of the Christian world, namely Gessner, Martyr, and Bullinger. Also Gessner’s Bibliotheca, now for the second time enriched with a great accession and corrected in infinite places. He also wrote notes on the Cosmography of Aethicus, which had not been edited before, and on the itinerary of Antoninus Augustus, which he corrected in many places by a collation of ancient manuscript copies. For he had wonderful industry and skill in correcting the corrupt places of books and restoring them to their integrity. But above all, his effort to adorn and illustrate our fatherland, that is, the whole of Helvetia, with Latin letters (which had not been done by anyone before) was excellent and worthy of every praise; the quality and magnitude of which can be very easily judged from those two little books, as it were first fruits, recently published. These are the two books on the league and republic of the Helvetians. Also a description of Valais, which is contained in two books, to which is joined a commentary on the Alps. From these, as one judges the lion by his claws, one may recognize the whole history of Helvetia and a periegesis travelogue/survey of the same, such as it would have been if he had been able to complete it. He had a great communion and society of historical studies of this kind with Aegidius Tschudi, a most famous man and most studious of Helvetian antiquities, who had attempted in German letters what our Simler had attempted in Latin. For both had given each other mutual and praiseworthy labors for illustrating their common fatherland, that is, Helvetia, in German and Latin letters. This was a famous endeavor of theirs, a most rich witness of the piety of both toward their fatherland, that is, Helvetia, which looked to propagating its praises and glory far and wide, and to wiping away the calumnies and insults with which it is lacerated by many. For by what reason could that be done more easily than by letters, which, circumscribed by no limits of times or places, are disseminated far and wide through all ages and places of the world, and without which, like certain lights, everything, as he most truly says, however excellent it may be, lies in darkness? They therefore betray both their own ignorance and notable ingratitude toward their fatherland, and toward these very heralds of its praise and glory, who [insult] such excellent [works] of the fatherland.