He admits that some, perhaps quite excellent, epigrams have escaped him, either because he never read them or because he was at the moment of reading less attentive. But the paucity or lack of selections from a given writer should not be taken as an indication of ignorance or indiligence in that case. Rather, he confidently professes to have exerted the greatest patience and industry--patience, since so many were so bad. His hope was by his trouble to free others from so much trouble. With this in mind he read countless authors of different ages and countries, a total of around 50,000 epigrams, from most of which nothing at all was worth excerpting. There is no point in memorializing the names of the bad, except to note in passing that he found hardly anything so inept as the _Delitiae_, as they call them, of the German poets[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.