oets[5]--in this connection he gives special mention to
the book of Lancinus Curtius[6], which contains 2,000 epigrams.

He found some fairly tolerable epigrams in other books, which
nevertheless he excluded, for what is lacking in distinction is better
not known at all than learned at the expense of better things, not to
speak of its being a burden to the mind which gradually will lose the
ability to judge excellence, and so, becoming accustomed to
mediocrity, will be unable to attempt anything higher. There is no
more useful motto for a man in quest of solid learning than Grotius'
line: "Not to know some things is a large part of wisdom."[7]

The editor added to the epigrams a collection of sententiae since the
two forms are quite cognate, the sententia being a kind of shorter
epigram, for the principal part of an epigram, the conclusion, usually
consists in a sententia. It is true that such collections have come in
bad repute, and not wholly unjustly, but the thing itself is worth
doing. For what is our aim in reading books except to nourish and
fashion judgement? and what better serves this end than sententiae,
which furnish as it were the premises and axioms by which one is able
to form a just and true judgement on most of the duties and affairs of
human life? Hence he extracted these gems from the huge pile of
trifles in which they lay mixed. Perhaps they please less in isolation
than when one runs across them as he reads, and for this reason such
anthologizing should be contemned. But it would be precious to refuse
a great accession of profit because of a small dimunition of pleasure.

The editor thought that in many cases the selections should not be
published without notes, for epigrams have often some obscurity in
them and their whole charm is lost unless the light that would
illuminate it is at hand. The notes to the selections from Martial are
pretty largely taken from Farnaby. Elsewhere the editor has supplied
notes sparingly, at those points where the reader might be stuck. He
has also changed the titles of a good many pieces, especially where
the original involved the name of some fictitious or base person. The
purpose of a title is to recall the whole piece to memory or to
facilitate finding it in an index. Why, then, title an epigram _To
Gargilianus_ or _Cecilianus_, which gives no idea of what the epigram
is about? The editor, therefore, has substituted titles which express
as well as possible the fo