COMPLIMENTARY AND INTRODUCTORY. 77 



hope some day, and that soon, to enjoy them, the want of 

 them would be felt far more seriously than it is. Eor while 

 I think it worthy of the highest praise and glory to write 

 books that are worth reading and useful to the human race, 

 it is my utmost pleasure to enjoy the fruit of the vigils and 

 the literary toils of others ; so that when I regret having 

 been without your works, and grieve at it and think it my 

 hurt, I console myself with the expectation of hereafter 

 reading them. For your copiousness in writing, your 

 variety, your multifarious reading, your observation of things, 

 the ornate gravity of your sentences, your pure and chaste 

 method of narration, make it necessary that whoever com- 

 prehends the unfathomable depths of memory, the most 

 practised industry and the extreme acuteness of judgment in 

 your existing monuments, will praise you, honour you, and 

 venerate you. 



" But that which has delighted me most is, that in reading 

 your fifth book upon Wisdom, I saw that you cited just ex- 

 perience, when, among other things, you wrote as follows : 

 1 But what if the art itself yield not a livelihood, and there be 

 no passage to another calling, a new invention has to be 

 struck out (for the novelty of a thing always begets favour) 

 that in some particular shall be of certain use. "When we 

 ourselves long laboured in this city against envy, and our in- 

 come was not so much as our expenses (so much harder is 

 the condition of a merit that is seen than of one that is un- 

 known, and there is no prophet of honour in his own country), 

 we made many attempts to discover new things in our art ; 

 for away from the art no step could be made. At length I 

 thought out the cure of Phthisis, which they call Phthoe, 

 despaired of for ages, and I healed many, who now survive. 

 I discovered, also, the method of curing aqua intercutis, 



