have found out, that whom you cannot equal or come near in doing,
you would destroy or ruin with evil speaking; as if you had bound
both your wits and natures 'prentices to slander, and then came
forth the best artificers when you could form the foulest calumnies.

Nil gratius protervo lib.--Indeed nothing is of more credit or
request now than a petulant paper, or scoffing verses; and it is but
convenient to the times and manners we live with, to have then the
worst writings and studies flourish when the best begin to be
despised. Ill arts begin where good end.

Jam literae sordent.--Pastus hodiern. ingen.--The time was when men
would learn and study good things, not envy those that had them.
Then men were had in price for learning; now letters only make men
vile. He is upbraidingly called a poet, as if it were a
contemptible nick-name: but the professors, indeed, have made the
learning cheap--railing and tinkling rhymers, whose writings the
vulgar more greedily read, as being taken with the scurrility and
petulancy of such wits. He shall not have a reader now unless he
jeer and lie. It is the food of men's natures; the diet of the
times; gallants cannot sleep else. The writer must lie and the
gentle reader rests happy to hear the worthiest works
misinterpreted, the clearest actions obscured, the innocentest life
traduced: and in such a licence of lying, a field so fruitful of
slanders, how can there be matter wanting to his laughter? Hence
comes the epidemical infection; for how can they escape the
contagion of the writings, whom the virulency of the calumnies hath
not staved off from reading?

Sed seculi morbus.--Nothing doth more invite a greedy reader than an