d to her;
For sceptered fathers famed, more famed for war,
And by Astraea's doom of rare renown;
Whom War as general, Peace lauds unarmed,
To whom so many lands and seas are slaves;
Neither the fleece drinking barbarian dye
I send you, nor Sidonian artifice,
Nor Indian ivory, Dalmatian stone,
Nor the choice incense that delights grave Jove,
Nor warring eagles, no, nor cities stormed,
Nor plundered canvas from the conquered sea;
Louis, I give you Christ as King and Lord,
Titles not foreign to the ones you bear:
For I would send you, greatest of all kings,
Than which I cannot more, I send you God.[17]

Surely it is a long way around to enumerate what you will not give the
King in order to make clear how slight your gift is. Besides, the
conclusion is harsh in that a book about Christ is called God and
Christ, as if Christ and a book about him were the same thing. But
this is a commonplace absurdity of what one may call the dedicatory
_genre_, in which writers almost always speak of their book as if
there were no difference between the book itself and its subject:
thus, if they write about Caesar or Cato, "Caesar and Cato," they
say, "prostrate themselves before you;" If about Cicero, "Look," they
say, "Cicero addresses you and takes you as patron:" all of which are
correctly to be reckoned in the category of false statements.

_In what way ideas are to be made agreeable to men's character. On
avoiding offense; and, first, on obscenity._

The harmony of idea and subject is a matter fairly easy to understand,
but the attuning of idea and men's character is more difficult to
grasp and requires more painstaking treatment. For in this inquiry the
whole scope of human nature must be thoroughly examined, and our
silent inclinations and aversions must be laid open so that we will
know how to avoid the one and comply with the other. For it cannot be
that anything should please that offends nature, or anything displease
that complies with natural inclinations. We will touch briefly on some
of these points, but only on those that suffice to our purposes.

In the first place, there is in the nature of man an aversion to the
shameful and the obscene, and this the more powerful in the best and
well-educated natures. All obscene ideas offend this sense of shame to
such an extent that they are regarded as alien to nature, ugly, and
uncivilised. Nor does it matter that some