on and accomplishment of which enterprise and generous undertaking
thou mayst easily remember how that I have spared nothing, but have so
helped thee, as if I had had no other treasure in this world but to see
thee once in my life completely well-bred and accomplished, as well in
virtue, honesty, and valour, as in all liberal knowledge and civility, and
so to leave thee after my death as a mirror representing the person of me
thy father, and if not so excellent, and such in deed as I do wish thee,
yet such in my desire.

But although my deceased father of happy memory, Grangousier, had bent his
best endeavours to make me profit in all perfection and political
knowledge, and that my labour and study was fully correspondent to, yea,
went beyond his desire, nevertheless, as thou mayest well understand, the
time then was not so proper and fit for learning as it is at present,
neither had I plenty of such good masters as thou hast had. For that time
was darksome, obscured with clouds of ignorance, and savouring a little of
the infelicity and calamity of the Goths, who had, wherever they set
footing, destroyed all good literature, which in my age hath by the divine
goodness been restored unto its former light and dignity, and that with
such amendment and increase of the knowledge, that now hardly should I be
admitted unto the first form of the little grammar-schoolboys--I say, I,
who in my youthful days was, and that justly, reputed the most learned of
that age. Which I do not speak in vain boasting, although I might lawfully
do it in writing unto thee--in verification whereof thou hast the authority
of Marcus Tullius in his book of old age, and the sentence of Plutarch in
the book entitled How a man may praise himself without envy--but to give
thee an emulous encouragement to strive yet further.

Now is it that the minds of men are qualified with all manner of
discipline, and the old sciences revived which for many ages were extinct.
Now it is that the learned languages are to their pristine purity restored,
viz., Greek, without which a man may be ashamed to account himself a
scholar, Hebrew, Arabic, Chaldaean, and Latin. Printing likewise is now in
use, so elegant and so correct that better cannot be imagined, although it
was found out but in my time by divine inspiration, as by a diabolical
suggestion on the other side was the invention of ordnance. All the world
is full of knowing men, of most learned schoolmasters, an