The Greeks were wonderfully happy in their titles. One work they called Κηριον, which means that it was as sweet as a honeycomb; another Κερας Αµαλθειας, or Cornu Copiæ, so that you might expect to get even a draft of pigeon’s milk from it. Then they have their Flowers, their Muses, Magazines, Manuals, Gardens, Pictures, and Sketches, all of them titles for which a man might be tempted even to forfeit his bail. But when you enter upon the works, O ye Gods and Goddesses! how full of emptiness! Our duller countrymen have merely their Antiquities, or their Examples, or their Arts. I think one of the most humorous of them has his Nocturnal Studies. Varro, indeed, is not much behind him, when he calls one of his satires A Trick and a Half,[5] and another, Turning the Tables. Diodorus was the first among the Greeks who laid aside this trifling manner and named his history The Library. Apion, the grammarian,—he whom Tiberius Cæsar called the Trumpeter of the World, but would rather seem to be the Bell of the Town-Crier,—supposed that every one to whom he inscribed any work would thence acquire immortality. I do not regret not having given my work a more fanciful title. That I may not, however, appear to inveigh so completely against the Greeks, I should wish to be considered under the same point of view with those inventors of the arts of painting and sculpture, of whom you will find an account in these volumes, whose works, although they are so perfect that we are never satisfied with admiring them, are inscribed with a temporary title, such as “Apelles, or Polycletus, was doing this;” implying that the work was only commenced and still imperfect, and that the artist might benefit by the criticisms that were made on it and alter any part that required it, if he had not been prevented by death. It is also a great mark of their modesty, that they inscribed their works as if they were the last which they had executed, and as still in hand at the time of their death. I think there are but three works of art which are inscribed positively with the words “such a one executed this;” of these I shall give an account in the proper place. In these cases it appears, that the artist felt the most perfect satisfaction with his work, and certainly these pieces have excited the envy of every one. I freely admit, that much may be added to my works; not only to this, but to all which I have published. By this admission I hope to escape from the carping critics, and I have the more reason to say this, because I hear that there are certain Stoics and Logicians, and also Epicureans (from the Grammarians I expected as much), who are virulent against the little work I published on Grammar.[6] But I well know, that even a woman once wrote against Theophrastus, a man so eminent for his eloquence that he obtained from it his name, which signifies the Divine[7] Speaker.