PREFACE, 24-27 



tempt a man to forfeit his bail." But when you get 

 inside them, good heavens, what a void you will 

 find between the covers ! Our authors being more 

 serious use the titles Antiquities, Instances and Systems, 

 the wittiest, Talks by Lamplight, I suppose because 

 the author was a toper — indeed Tippler was his name. 

 Varro makes a rather smaller claim in his Satires 

 A Ulysses-and-a-half and Folding-tablet. Diodorus 

 among the Greeks stopped playing with words and 

 gave his history the title of Library. Indeed the 

 pliilologist Apion (the person whom Tiberius Caesar 

 used to call ' the world's cymbal,' though he might 

 rather have been thought to be a drum,* advertising 

 his own renown) wrote that persons to whom he 

 dedicated his compositions received from him the 

 gift of immortahty. For myself, I am not ashamed 

 of not having invented any HveUer title. And so as 

 not to seem a downright adversary of the Greeks, 

 I should hke to be accepted on the hnes of those 

 founders of painting and sculpture who, as you will 

 find in these volumes, used to inscribe their finished 

 works, even the masterpieces which we can never be 

 tired of admiring, with a provisional title such as 

 Worked on by Apelles or Polycliius, as though art was 

 always a thing in process and not completed, so that 

 when faced by the vagaries of criticism the artist 

 might have left him a Une of retreat to indulgence, by 

 implying that he intended, if not interrupted, to 

 correct any defect noted. Hence it is exceedingly 

 modest of them to have inscribed all their works 

 in a manner suggesting that they were their latest, 

 and as though they had been snatched away from 

 each of them by fate. Not more than three, I 

 fancy, are recorded as having an inscription denoting 



17 



