It was not enough, my accomplished friend More, that you formerly spent all your care, labour and study upon the interests and advantage of individuals; but you must bestow them (such is your kindness and generosity) on the community at large. You thought that this benefit of yours, whatever it might be, deserved the greater indulgence, courted the greater favour, and aimed at the higher renown, on this very account, that it was likely to profit the more, the more widely it was diffused and the more there were to share it. To confer this benefit has always been your object on other occasions, and of late you have, with singular good fortune, been most successful in attaining it: I mean, in that ‘afternoon’s talk’, which you have reduced to writing and published, about the right and good constitution, that all must long for, of the Utopian commonwealth.
In your happy description of that fair institution, we nowhere miss either the highest learning or consummate knowledge of the world. Both those qualities are blended together in the work, meeting on such equal terms that neither yields to the other, but both contend on an equality for the palm.* The truth is, you are the able possessor of such varied learning, and on the other hand of so wide and exact a knowledge of the world, that, whatever you write you assert from full experience, and, whatever assertion you have decided to make, you write most learnedly. A felicity this as rare as it is admirable! What makes it rarer is that it withholds itself from the many, and only imparts itself to the few;—to such above all as have the candour to wish, the knowledge to understand, the credit which will qualify, and the influence which will enable them to consult the common interest as dutifully, justly, and providently as you now plainly do. For, deeming yourself born not for yourself alone, but for the whole world, you have thought fit by this fair service to make the whole world itself beholden to you.
And this result you would not have been able to effect so well and rightly by any other means, as by delineating for rational beings themselves an ideal commonwealth, a pattern and finished model of conduct, than which there has never been seen in the world one more wholesome in its institution, or more perfect, or to be thought more desirable. For it far surpasses and leaves a long way behind the many famous states, that we have heard so much about, of Sparta and Athens and Rome. Had these been inaugurated under the same favourable conditions, with the same institutions, laws, enactments and rules of life to control them as this commonwealth of yours, they would not, we may be sure, have by this time been lying in ruins, levelled with the ground, and now, alas, obliterated beyond all hope of renewal. On the contrary, they would have been still unfallen, still fortunate and prosperous, leading a happy existence, mistresses of the world meanwhile, and dividing a widespread empire by land and sea.
Of these commonwealths you compassionated the unhappy lot. And so you wished to save other states in like manner, which now hold the supreme power, from undergoing a like vicissitude, by your picture of a perfect state; one which directed its chief energies not so much to framing laws as to appointing the most approved magistrates. (And with good reason: for otherwise, without them, even the best laws, if we take Plato’s word for it,* would all be counted dead.) Magistrates these, above all after whose likeness, pattern of uprightness, example of conduct, and mirror of justice, the whole state and right course of any perfect commonwealth whatever ought to be modelled; wherein should unite, above all things, prudence in the rulers, courage in the soldiers, temperance in the private individuals, and justice in all.*
And since the commonwealth you make so famous is manifestly formed, in fairest manner, of these principles it is no wonder if on this account it comes not only as an object of fear to many, but also of reverence to all nations, and one for all generations to tell of; the more so, that in it all competition for ownership is taken away, and no one has any private property at all. For the rest, all men have all things in common, with a view to the commonwealth itself; so that every matter, every action, however unimportant, whether public or private, instead of being directed to the greed of many or the caprice of a few, has sole reference to the upholding of one uniform justice, equality and communion. When that is made the entire object of every action, there must needs be a clearance of all that serves as matter and fuel and feeder of intrigue, of luxury, envy, and wrong; to which mankind are hurried on, even at times against their will, either by the possession of private property, or by the burning thirst of gain, and that most pitiable of all things, ambition, to their own great and immeasurable loss. For it is from these things that there often suddenly arise divisions of feeling, taking up of arms, and wars worse than civil; whereby not only is the flourishing state of wealthy republics utterly overthrown, but the renown they won in other days, the triumphs celebrated, the splendid trophies, the rich spoils so often won from conquered enemies, are all utterly effaced.
If on these matters the words I write should chance to be less convincing than I desire, there will at any rate be ready at hand the most sufficient witnesses for me to refer you to: I mean, the many great cities formerly laid waste, the states destroyed, the republics overthrown, the villages burnt and consumed. As scarce any relics or traces of their great calamity are to be seen at this day, so neither are their names preserved by any history, however ancient it be, and however far back its records extend.
These memorable disasters, devastations, overthrows, and other calamities of war our states, whatever they be, will easily succeed in escaping, if they only adapt themselves exactly to the one pattern of the Utopian commonwealth, and do not deviate a hair’s-breadth from it. By so acting alone, they will at length most fully recognize by the result how greatly they have profited by this service you have rendered them; especially since by its acquisition they have learnt to preserve their own state in safety, unharmed, and victorious. It follows that their debt to you, their present deliverer, will be no less than is the just due of those, who have saved—I do not say some one member of a state, but the whole state itself.
Meanwhile farewell. Go on and prosper, ever devising, carrying out and perfecting something, the bestowal of which on your country may give it long continuance and yourself immortality. Farewell, learned and courteous More, glory of your island, and ornament of this world of ours.
From my house at Mechlin,* 1516.
I have been highly delighted, my dearest Peter, with the criticism, which has come also to your ears, of that very clever man* who in regard to my Utopia employs the following dilemma. ‘If it is supposed to be true, I consider some details to be rather absurd; if fictitious, I should like to know More’s real opinion about some of the matters he relates.’
Whoever this man may be, Peter (and I suspect him to be learned and feel sure he is a friend), I am most grateful to him. Indeed I do not know that anyone, since the book was published, has given me such pleasure as he has by his candid criticism. First of all it is gratifying to find that, whether out of friendship to me or out of real interest in the book, he has not wearied of the task of reading it to the very end. Nor has he read it cursorily or hastily, as priests read their breviaries (those, that is to say, who read them at all), but so slowly and carefully that he weighs carefully every point as he proceeds. Then by the very fact that he disagrees with certain points, he makes it sufficiently evident that his agreement with the rest is not rash but considered. Lastly, by the very terms which he employs to blame me, he confers on me, indirectly, much more praise than have those who have tried to flatter me. For a man who, on reading something faulty that I may have written, complains that he has been disappointed, clearly shows what a high opinion he has conceived of me. As for myself, on the other hand, if out of all that I have written some few details at least should not be entirely absurd, it is much more than I ventured to hope for.
But (for I want, in my turn, to be equally open with him) I do not see why he should pride himself on being so sharp-sighted (or, as the Greeks call it, ‘oxyderches’) as to find some of the Utopian customs rather absurd, or to consider that I have unwisely contrived certain features in my commonwealth, as if nowhere else in the world were there any absurdity, or as if out of all the philosophers no one, in laying down regulations for the State, the ruler, or the private house, had ever suggested anything that could be improved upon. As to which, if I were not restrained by the reverence I bear to the memory, consecrated by age, of great men, I could from any one of them extract propositions which everyone would surely agree with me in condemning.
But now as he doubts whether Utopia is real or imaginary, I in turn demand his real opinion. I do not indeed deny that if I had determined to write about a commonwealth, and the idea of one had formed itself in my mind, I would not perhaps have thought it a sin to add fictitious details so that the truth, thus coated with honey, might be more palatable to my readers. But in that case even if I had wished to abuse the ignorance of the unlearned, I should certainly not have omitted to insert indications by which scholars would easily have been able to see through my design. If I had done nothing else I should at least have given such names to the prince, the river, the city, the island, as would have warned the skilful reader that the island exists nowhere, that the city is of shadows, the river without water, and the prince without people. It would not have been difficult to do and would have been much more witty. Unless truth had compelled me, I should certainly not have been so stupid as to use those outlandish, meaningless names, Utopia, Anyder, Amaurote, Ademus.
But, dear Giles, some men are so cautious. Whereas we, in simple faith, wrote out all that Hythloday narrated, they are so wary, so hard to satisfy, that they can scarcely be persuaded to believe it. At any rate, whatever they may think of the story, I am glad to think that they cannot call into question my own veracity, for I can say of my offspring what Mysis in Terence* says to prove that the son of Glycery was not supposititious, ‘Thank God there were reputable witnesses present at the birth.’ For it has, indeed, turned out most fortunately for me that Raphael not only said what he did to you and to me, but to many other men of dignity and credit he said at least as much if not indeed more. Or if they are so unbelieving as not to trust even these, let them go to Hythloday himself, for he is yet living. Only recently I heard from some who had just come from Portugal that on March 1 last he was as well and strong as ever. Let them ask him, let them worm out the truth from him, if they please, by their questions, but let them understand that all I can do is to reproduce the story faithfully, not to guarantee the truth of what I was told.
Farewell, my dearest Peter, with your delightful wife and clever daughter, to whom my wife sends her best wishes.
I owe you many thanks, my learned young friend Lupset, for having sent me Thomas More’s Utopia, and so drawn my attention to what is very pleasant, and likely to be very profitable, reading.
It is not long ago since you prevailed upon me (your entreaties seconding my own strong inclination) to read the six books of Galen On the Preservation of the Health, to which that master of the Greek and Latin tongues, Dr Thomas Linacre, has lately rendered the service (or rather, paid the compliment) of translating them from the extant originals into Latin.* So well has the task been performed, that if all that author’s works (which I consider worth all other medical lore put together) be in time translated, the want of a knowledge of Greek is not likely to be seriously felt by our schools of medicine.
I have hastily skimmed over that work, as it stands in Linacre’s papers (for the courteous loan of which, for so long a time, I am very greatly indebted to you) with the result that I deem myself much benefited by the perusal. But I promise myself still greater profit when the book itself, on the publication of which at the presses of this city you are now busily engaged, shall have appeared in print.
While I thought myself already under a sufficient obligation to you on this account, here you have presented to me More’s Utopia, as an appendix or supplement to your former kindness. He is a man of the keenest discernment, of a pleasant disposition, well versed in knowledge of the world. I have had the book by me in the country, where my time was taken up with running about and giving directions to workpeople (for you know something, and have heard more, of my having been occupied for more than a twelvemonth on business connected with my country-house); and was so impressed by reading it, as I learnt and studied the manners and customs of the Utopians, that I well-nigh forgot, nay, even abandoned, the management of my family affairs. For I perceived that all the theory and practice of domestic economy, all care whatever for increasing one’s income, was mere waste of time.
And yet, as all see and are aware, the whole race of mankind is goaded on by this very thing, as if some gadfly were bred within them to sting them. The result is that we must needs confess the object of nearly all legal and civil qualification and training to be this: that with jealous and watchful cunning, as each one has a neighbour with whom he is connected by ties of citizenship, or even at times of relationship, he should be ever conveying or abstracting something from him; should pare away, repudiate, squeeze, chouse, chisel, cozen, extort, pillage, purloin, thieve, filch, rob, and (partly with the connivance, partly with the sanction of the laws) be ever plundering and appropriating.
This goes on all the more in countries where the civil and canon law, as they are called, have greater authority in the two courts. For it is evident that their customs and institutions are pervaded by the principle, that those are to be deemed the high-priests of Law and Equity, who are skilled in caveats (or capias, rather); men who hawk at their unwary fellow-citizens; artists in formulas, that is, in gudgeon-traps; adepts in concocted law; getters up of cases; jurisconsults of a controverted, perverted, inverted jus. These are the only fit persons to give opinions as to what is fair and good; nay, what is far more, to settle with plenary power what each one is to be allowed to have, and what not to have, and the extent and limit of his tenure. How deluded must public opinion be to have determined matters thus!
The truth is that most of us, blind with the thick rheum of ignorance in our eyes, suppose that each one’s cause, as a rule, is just, in proportion to its accordance with the requirements of the law, or to the way in which he has based his claim on the law. Whereas, were we agreed to demand our rights in accordance with the rule of truth, and what the simple Gospel prescribes, the dullest would understand, and the most senseless admit, if we put it to them, that, in the decrees of the canonists, the divine law differs as much from the human; and, in our civil laws and royal enactments, true equity differs as much from law; as the principles laid down by Christ, the founder of human society, and the usages of His disciples, differ from the decrees and enactments of those who think the summum bonum and perfection of happiness to lie in the moneybags of a Croesus or a Midas.* So that, if you chose to define Justice nowadays, in the way that early writers liked to do, as the power who assigns to each his due, you would either find her non-existent in public, or, if I may use such a comparison, you would have to admit that she was a kind of kitchen stewardess: and this, alike whether you regard the character of our present rulers, or the disposition of fellow-citizens and fellow-countrymen one towards another.
Perhaps indeed it may be argued, that the law I speak of has been derived from that inherent, world-old justice called natural law; which teaches that the stronger a man is, the more he should possess; and, the more he possesses, the more eminent among his countrymen he ought to be: with the result that now we see it an accepted principle in the Law of Nations, that persons who are unable to help their fellows by any art or practice worth mentioning, if only they are adepts in those complicated knots and stringent bonds, by which men’s properties are tied up (things accounted a mixture of Gordian knots and charlatanry, with nothing very wonderful about them, by the ignorant multitude, and by scholars living, for the sake of recreation or of investigating the truth, at a distance from the Courts),—that these persons, I say, should have an income equal to that of a thousand of their countrymen, nay, even of a whole state, and sometimes more than that; and that they should then be greeted with the honourable titles of wealthy men, thrifty men, makers of splendid fortunes. Such in truth is the age in which we live; such our manners and customs; such our national character. These have pronounced it lawful for a man’s credit and influence to be high, in proportion to the way in which he has been the architect of his own fortunes and of those of his heirs: an influence, in fact, which goes on increasing, according as their descendants in turn, to the remotest generation, vie in heaping up with fine additions the property gained by their ancestors; which amounts to saying, according as they have ousted more and more extensively their connections, kindred, and even their blood relations.
But the founder and regulator of all property, Jesus Christ, left among His followers a Pythagorean communion* and love; and ratified it by a plain example, when Ananias* was condemned to death for breaking this law of communion. By laying down this principle, Christ seems to me to have abolished, at any rate among his followers, all the voluminous quibbles of the civil law, and still more of the later canon law; which latter we see at the present day holding the highest position in jurisprudence, and controlling our destiny.
As for the island of Utopia, which I hear is also called ‘Udepotia’,* it is said (if we are to believe the story), by what must be owned a singular good fortune, to have adopted Christian usages both in public and in private; to have imbibed the wisdom thereto belonging; and to have kept it undefiled to this very day. The reason is, that it holds with firm grip to three divine institutions:—namely, the absolute equality, or, if you prefer to call it so, the civil communication, of all things good and bad among fellow-citizens; a settled and unwavering love of peace and quietness; and a contempt for gold and silver. Three things these, which overturn, one may say, all fraud, all imposture, cheating, roguery, and unprincipled deception. Would that Providence, on its own behalf, would cause these three principles of Utopian law to be fixed in the minds of all men by the rivets of a strong and settled conviction. We should soon see pride, covetousness, insane competition, and almost all other deadly weapons of our adversary the Devil, fall powerless; we should see the interminable array of law-books, [the work of] so many excellent and solid understandings, that occupy men till the very day of their death, consigned to bookworms, as mere hollow and empty things, or else given up to make wrapping-paper for shops.*
Good heavens! what holiness of the Utopians has had the power of earning such a blessing from above, that greed and covetousness have for so many ages failed to enter, either by force or stealth, into that island alone? that they have failed to drive out from it, by wanton effrontery, justice and honour?
Would that great Heaven in its goodness had dealt so kindly with the countries which keep, and would not part with, the appellation they bear, derived from His most holy name! Of a truth, greed, which perverts and sinks down so many minds, otherwise noble and elevated, would be gone from hence once for all, and the Golden Age* of Saturn would return. In Utopia one might verily suppose that there is a risk of Aratus* and the early poets having been mistaken in their opinion, when they made Justice depart from earth, and placed her in the Zodiac. For, if we are to believe Hythloday, she must needs have stayed behind in that island, and not yet made her way to heaven.
But in truth I have ascertained by full inquiry, that Utopia lies outside the bounds of the known world. It is in fact one of the Fortunate Isles,* perhaps very close to the Elysian Fields; for More himself testifies that Hythloday has not yet stated its position definitely. It is itself divided into a number of cities, but all uniting or confederating into one state, named Hagnopolis;* a state contented with its own customs, its own goods, blest with innocence, leading a kind of heavenly life, on a lower level indeed than heaven, but above the defilements of this world we know, which amid the endless pursuits of mankind, as empty and vain as they are keen and eager, is being hurried in a swollen and eddying tide to the cataract.
It is to Thomas More, then, that we owe our knowledge of this island. It is he who, in our generation, has made public this model of a happy life and rule for leading it, the discovery, as he tells us, of Hythloday: for he ascribes all to him. For while Hythloday has built the Utopians their state, and established for them their rites and customs; while, in so doing, he has borrowed from them and brought home for us the representation of a happy life; it is beyond question More, who has set off by his literary style the subject of that island and its customs. He it is who has perfected, as by rule and square, the City of the Hagnopolitans itself, adding all those touches by which grace and beauty and weight accrue to the noble work; even though in executing that work he has claimed for himself only a common mason’s share. We see that it has been a matter of conscientious scruple* with him, not to assume too important a part in the work, lest Hythloday should have just cause for complaint, on the ground of More having plucked the first flowers of that fame, which would have been left for him, if he had himself ever decided to give an account of his adventures to the world. He was afraid, of course, that Hythloday, who was residing of his own choice in the island of Udepotia, might some day come in person upon the scene, and be vexed and aggrieved at this unkindness on his part, in leaving him the glory of this discovery with the best flowers plucked off. To be of this persuasion is the part of good men and wise.
Now while More is one who of himself carries weight, and has great authority to rest upon, I am led to place unreserved confidence in him by the testimony of Peter Giles of Antwerp. Though I have never made his acquaintance in person (apart from recommendations of his learning and character that have reached me), I love him on account of his being the intimate friend of the illustrious Erasmus, who has deserved so well of letters of every kind, whether sacred or profane; with whom personally I have long corresponded and formed ties of friendship.
Farewell, my dear Lupset. Greet for me, at the first opportunity, either by word of mouth or by letter, Linacre, that pillar of the British name in all that concerns good learning; one who is now, as I hope, not more yours than ours. He is one of the few whose good opinion I should be very glad, if possible, to gain. When he was himself known to be staying here, he gained in the highest degree the good opinion of me and of Jehan Ruelle,* my friend and the sharer in my studies. And his singular learning and careful industry I should be the first to look up to and strive to copy.
Greet More also once and again for me, either by message, as I said before, or by word of mouth. As I think and often repeat, Minerva* has long entered his name on her selectest album; and I love and revere him in the highest degree for what he has written about this isle of the New World, Utopia.
In his history our age and those which succeed it will have a nursery, so to speak, of polite and useful institutions; from which men may borrow customs, and introduce and adapt them each to his own state. Farewell.
From Paris, the 31st of July.
I have hitherto been pleased beyond measure with all that my friend More has written, but felt some distrust of my own judgment, by reason of the close friendship between us. But now that I see learned men to be all unanimously of my opinion, even outdoing me in the warmth of their admiration for his transcendant genius (a proof of their greater discernment, though not of their greater affection), I am quite satisfied that I am in the right, and shall not shrink in future from openly expressing what I think. What would not such marvellous natural gifts have accomplished, if his intellect had been trained in Italy; if it were wholly devoted to literature; if it had had time to ripen for its proper harvest, its own autumn? While quite young, he amused himself with composing epigrams, many of them written when he was a mere boy. He has never gone out of his native Britain, save once or twice, when acting as ambassador for his sovereign in the Netherlands.* He is married, and has the cares of a family; he has the duties of a public office to discharge, and is immersed in the business of the law-courts; with so many important affairs of state distracting him besides, that you would wonder at his having leisure even to think of books.
So I have sent you his Prolusions* and Utopia. If you think fit, let them go forth to the world and to posterity with the recommendation of being printed by you. For such is the reputation of your press, that for a book to be known to have been published by Froben, is a passport to the approbation of the learned.
Farewell, and greet for me your good father-in-law, your charming wife, and the darling children. Mind you bring up in good learning my little godson Erasmus, in whom I have a claim as well as you; for learning has rocked his cradle.
Louvain: Aug. 25th, 1517.
Upon a time when tidings came to the city of Corinth that King Philip, father to Alexander surnamed the Great, was coming thitherward with an army royal to lay siege to the city, the Corinthians being forthwith stricken with great fear, began busily and earnestly to look about them and to fall to work on all hands.* Some to scour and trim up harness, some to carry stones, some to amend and build higher the walls, some to rampire and fortify the bulwarks and fortresses, some one thing and some another for the defending and strengthening of the city. The which busy labour and toil of theirs when Diogenes the philosopher saw, having no profitable business whereupon to set himself on work (neither any man required his labour and help as expedient for the commonwealth in that necessity), immediately girded about him his philosophical cloak, and began to roll and tumble up and down hither and thither upon the hillside that lieth adjoining to the city his great barrel or tun, wherein he dwelled, for other dwelling-place would he have none. This seeing one of his friends, and not a little musing thereat, came to him: and, ‘I pray thee, Diogenes,’ quoth he, ‘why dost thou thus, or what meanest thou hereby?’ ‘Forsooth I am tumbling my tub too,’ quoth he, ‘because it were no reason that I only should be idle, where so many be working.’*
In semblable manner, right honourable sir, though I be, as I am indeed, of much less ability than Diogenes was to do anything that shall or may be for the advancement and commodity of the public wealth of my native country; yet I, seeing every sort and kind of people in their vocation and degree busily occupied about the commonwealth’s affairs, and especially learned men daily putting forth in writing new inventions and devices to the furtherance of the same, thought it my bounden duty to God and to my country so to tumble my tub: I mean so to occupy and exercise myself in bestowing such spare hours as I (being at the beck and commandment of others), could conveniently win to myself, that though no commodity of that my labour and travail to the public weal should arise, yet it might by this appear that mine endeavour and goodwill hereunto was not lacking. To the accomplishment, therefore, and fulfilling of this my mind and purpose, I took upon me to turn and translate out of Latin into our English tongue the fruitful and profitable book which Sir Thomas More, knight, compiled and made of the new isle Utopia, containing and setting forth the best state and form of a public weal, a work (as it appeareth) written almost forty years ago by the said Sir Thomas More the author thereof. The which man, forasmuch as he was a man of late time, yea almost of this our days, and for the excellent qualities where-with the great goodness of God had plentifully endowed him, and for the high place and room whereunto his prince had most graciously called him, notably well known, not only among us his countrymen, but also in foreign countries and nations; therefore I have not much to speak of him. This only I say: that it is much to be lamented of all, and not only of us Englishmen, that a man of so incomparable wit, of so profound knowledge, of so absolute learning, and of so fine eloquence was yet nevertheless so much blinded, rather with obstinacy than with ignorance, that he could not or rather would not see the shining light of God’s holy truth in certain principal points of Christian religion; but did rather choose to persevere and continue in his wilful and stubborn obstinacy even to the very death.*
This I say is a thing much to be lamented. But letting this matter pass, I return again to Utopia. Which (as I said before) is a work not only for the matter that it containeth fruitful and profitable, but also for the writer’s eloquent Latin style pleasant and delectable. Which he that readeth in Latin, as the author himself wrote it, perfectly understanding the same, doubtless he shall take great pleasure and delight both in the sweet eloquence of the writer and also in the witty invention and fine conveyance or disposition of the matter, but most of all in the good and wholesome lessons which be there in great plenty and abundance. But now I fear greatly that in this my simple translation, through my rudeness and ignorance in our English tongue, all the grace and pleasure of the eloquence where-with the matter in Latin is finely set forth, may seem to be utterly excluded and lost, and therefore the fruitfulness of the matter itself much peradventure diminished and appaired. For who knoweth not, which knoweth anything, that an eloquent style setteth forth and highly commendeth a mean matter? Whereas on the other side rude and unlearned speech defaceth and disgraceth a very good matter.
According as I heard once a wise man say, a good tale evil told were better untold, and an evil tale well told needeth none other solicitor. This thing I, well pondering and weighing with myself, and also knowing and acknowledging the barbarous rudeness of my translation, was fully determined never to have put it forth in print, had it not been for certain friends of mine, and especially one whom above all other I regarded, a man of sage and discreet wit and in worldly matters by long use well experienced, whose name is George Tadlowe, an honest citizen of London, and in the same city well accepted and of good reputation. At whose request and instance I first took upon my weak and feeble shoulders the heavy and weighty burden of this great enterprise. This man with divers other, but this man chiefly (for he was able to do more with me than many other), after that I had once rudely brought the work to an end, ceased not by all means possible continually to assault me until he had at the last, what by the force of his pithy arguments and strong reasons, and what by his authority so persuaded me, that he caused me to agree and consent to the imprinting hereof. He therefore, as the chief persuader, must take upon him the danger which upon this bold and rash enterprise shall ensue. I, as I suppose, am herein clearly acquit and discharged of all blame.
Yet, honourable sir, for the better avoiding of envious and malicious tongues, I (knowing you to be a man not only profoundly learned and well affected towards all such as either can or will take pains in the well bestowing of that poor talent which GOD hath endued them with, but also for your godly disposition and virtuous qualities not unworthily now placed in authority and called to honour) am the bolder humbly to offer and dedicate unto your good mastership this my simple work. Partly that under the safe conduct of your protection it may the better be defended from the obloquy of them which can say well by nothing that pleaseth not their fond and corrupt judgements, though it be else both fruitful and godly, and partly that by the means of this homely present I may the better renew and revive (which of late, as you know, I have already begun to do) that old acquaintance that was between you and me in the time of our childhood, being then schoolfellows together. Not doubting that you for your native goodness and gentleness will accept in good part this poor gift, as an argument or token that mine old goodwill and hearty affection towards you is not, by reason of long tract of time and separation of our bodies, anything at all quailed and diminished, but rather (I assure you) much augmented and increased. This verily is the chief cause that hath encouraged me to be so bold with your mastership, else truly this my poor present is of such simple and mean sort, that it is neither able to recompense the least portion of your great gentleness to me, of my part undeserved, both in the time of our old acquaintance and also now lately again bountifully showed, neither yet fit and meet for the very baseness of it to be offered to one so worthy as you be. But almighty God (who therefore ever be thanked) hath advanced you to such fortune and dignity, that you be of ability to accept thankfully as well a man’s goodwill as his gift. The same God grant you and all yours long and joyfully to continue in all godliness and prosperity.