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
unlooked-for subject.
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