rite seven ample commentaries on this comprehensive
discourse. I shall venture to affirm that, whatever difference may be
found in their several conjectures, they will be all, without the
least distortion, manifestly deducible from the text. Meantime it is my
earnest request that so useful an undertaking may be entered upon (if
their Majesties please) with all convenient speed, because I have a
strong inclination before I leave the world to taste a blessing which
we mysterious writers can seldom reach till we have got into our
graves, whether it is that fame being a fruit grafted on the body, can
hardly grow and much less ripen till the stock is in the earth, or
whether she be a bird of prey, and is lured among the rest to pursue
after the scent of a carcass, or whether she conceives her trumpet
sounds best and farthest when she stands on a tomb, by the advantage of
a rising ground and the echo of a hollow vault.

It is true, indeed, the republic of dark authors, after they once found
out this excellent expedient of dying, have been peculiarly happy in
the variety as well as extent of their reputation. For night being the
universal mother of things, wise philosophers hold all writings to be
fruitful in the proportion they are dark, and therefore the true
illuminated (that is to say, the darkest of all) have met with such
numberless commentators, whose scholiastic midwifery hath delivered
them of meanings that the authors themselves perhaps never conceived,
and yet may very justly be allowed the lawful parents of them, the
words of such writers being like seed, which, however scattered at
random, when they light upon a fruitful ground, will multiply far
beyond either the hopes or imagination of the sower.

And therefore, in order to promote so useful a work, I will here take
leave to glance a few innuendos that may be of great assistance to
those sublime spirits who shall be appointed to labour in a universal
comment upon this wonderful discourse. And first, I have couched a very
profound mystery in the number of o's multiplied by seven and divided
by nine. Also, if a devout brother of the Rosy Cross will pray
fervently for sixty-three mornings with a lively faith, and then
transpose certain letters and syllables according to prescription, in
the second and fifth section they will certainly reveal into a full
receipt of the _opus magnum_. Lastly, whoever will be at the pains to
calculate the whole number of each letter