d
that Theophrastes, as he himself declares, wrote and composed three
hundred volumes, Chrysippus sixty, Empedocles fifty, Servus Sulpicius
two hundred on civil law, Gallienus one hundred and thirty on the art
of medicine, and Origenes six thousand, all of which St. Jerome attests
having read; and yet, of so many admirable and excellent authors, there
now remain to us only some little fragments, so debased and vitiated in
several places, that they seem abortive, and as if they had been torn
from their author's hands by force.

On account of which, my Lady, since the occasion has offered, I have
been minded to present all these examples, with the object of exhorting
all those who treasure books and keep them sequestered in their
sanctuaries and cabinets, to henceforth publish them and bring them to
light, not only so that they may not keep back and bury the glory of
their ancestors, but also that they may not deprive their descendants
of the profit and pleasure which they might derive from the labour of
others.

In regard to myself, I will set forth more amply in the notice which I
will give to the reader the motive that induced me to put my hand to
the work of the present author, who has no need of trumpet and herald
to exalt and magnify her(1) greatness, inasmuch as there is no human
eloquence that could portray her more forcibly than she has portrayed
herself by the celestial strokes of her own brush; I mean by her other
writings, in which she has so well expressed the sincerity of her
doctrines, the vivacity of her faith, and the uprightness of her morals,
that the most learned men who reigned in her time were not ashamed
to call her a prodigy and miracle of nature. And albeit that Heaven,
jealous of our welfare, has snatched her from this mortal habitation,
yet her virtues rendered her so admirable and so engraved her in the
memory of every one, that the injury and lapse of time cannot efface
her from it; for we shall ceaselessly mourn and lament for her, like
Antimachus the Greek poet wept for Lysidichea, his wife, with sad verses
and delicate elegies which describe and reveal, her virtues and merits.

1 In the French text Boaistuau invariably refers to the
author as a personage of the masculine sex, with the evident
object of concealing the real authorship of the work.
Feminine pronouns have, however, been substituted in the
translation, as it is Queen Margaret who is referred to.