Negative descriptions labor under the same fault, namely those in which are enumerated not what the endowments of the subject are but what they are not. This is justly censured in one of Barlaeus' epigrams, which is in other respects quite polished: Of royal Bourbon blood, by whose aid once Belgium believed that God inclined 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.