verecunda est, musa jocosa mihi_.  But I presume I need no such apologies, I need not, as Socrates in Plato, cover his face when he spake of love, or blush and hide mine eyes, as Pallas did in her hood, when she was consulted by Jupiter about Mercury’s marriage, quod, super nuptiis virgo consulitur, it is no such lascivious, obscene, or wanton discourse; I have not offended your chaster ears with anything that is here written, as many French and Italian authors in their modern language of late have done, nay some of our Latin pontificial writers, Zanches, Asorius, Abulensis, Burchardus, &c., whom [4447]Rivet accuseth to be more lascivious than Virgil in Priapeiis, Petronius in Catalectis, Aristophanes in Lycistratae, Martialis, or any other pagan profane writer, qui tam atrociter ([4448]one notes) hoc genere peccarunt ut multa ingeniosissime scripta obscaenitatum gratia castae mentes abhorreant.  ’Tis not scurrile this, but chaste, honest, most part serious, and even of religion itself. [4449]"Incensed” (as he said) “with the love of finding love, we have sought it, and found it.”  More yet, I have augmented and added something to this light treatise (if light) which was not in the former editions, I am not ashamed to confess it, with a good [4450]author, quod extendi et locupletari hoc subjectum plerique postulabant, et eorum importunitate victus, animum utcunque renitentem eo adegi, ut jam sexta vice calamum in manum sumerem, scriptionique longe et a studiis et professione mea alienae, me accingerem, horas aliquas a seriis meis occupationibus interim suffuratus, easque veluti ludo cuidam ac recreationi destinans;

[4451] “Cogor------retrorsum
Vela dare, atque literare cursus
Olim relictos”------

etsi non ignorarem novos fortasse detractores novis hisce interpolationibus meis minime defuturos. [4452]

And thus much I have thought good to say by way of preface, lest any man (which [4453]Godefridus feared in his book) should blame in me lightness, wantonness, rashness, in speaking of love’s causes, enticements, symptoms, remedies, lawful and unlawful loves, and lust itself, [4454]I speak it only to tax and deter others from it, not to teach, but to show the vanities and fopperies of this heroical or Herculean love, [4455]and to apply remedies unto it.  I will treat of this with like liberty as of the rest.

[4456] “Sed dicam vobis, vos porro dicite multis
        Millibus, et facite haec charta loquatur anus.”

Condemn me not good reader then, or censure me hardly, if some part of this treatise to thy thinking as yet be too light; but consider better of it; Omnia munda mundis, [4457]a naked man to a modest woman is no otherwise than a picture, as Augusta Livia truly said, and [4458]_mala mens, malus animus_, ’tis as ’tis taken.  If in thy censure it be too light, I advise thee as Lipsius did his reader for some places of Plautus, istos quasi Sirenum scopulos