Hews, I must needs put into my confess’d conference touching Homer, though very little more than that I had with M. Harriots. Which two, I protest, are all, and preferred to all. Nor charge I their authorities with, any allowance of my general labour, but only of those one or two places, which for instances of my innovation, and how it showed to them, I imparted. If any tax me for too much periphrasis or circumlocution in some places, let them read Laurentius Valla, and Eobanus Hessus, who either use such shortness as cometh nothing home to Homer, or, where they shun that fault, are ten parts more paraphrastical than I. As for example, one place I will trouble you (if you please) to confer with the original, and one interpreter for all. It is in the end of the third book, and is Helen’s speech to Venus fetching her to Paris from seeing his cowardly combat with Menelaus; part of which speech I will here cite: Οὕνεκα δὴ νυ̑ν δι̑ον ᾽Αλέξανδρον Μενέλαος Νικήσας, &c. For avoiding the common reader’s trouble here, I must refer the more Greekish to the rest of the speech in Homer, whose translation _ad verbum_ by Spondanus I will here cite, and then pray you to confer it with that which followeth of Valla. _Quoniam verò nunc Alexandrum Menelaus Postquam vicit, vult odiosam me domum abducere, Propterea verò nunc dolum (seu dolos) cogitans advenisti? Sede apud ipsum vadens, deorum abnega vias, Neque unquam tuis pedibus revertaris in cœlum, Sed semper circa eum ærumnas perfer, et ipsum serva Donec te vel uxorem faciat, vel hic servam,_ etc. Valla thus: _Quoniam victo Paride, Menelaus me miseram est reportaturus ad lares, ideo tu, ideo falsâ sub imagine venisti, ut me deciperes ob tuam nimiam in Paridem benevolentiam: eò dum illi ades, dum illi studes, dum pro illo satagis, dum illum observas atque custodis, deorum commercium reliquisti, nec ad eos reversura es ampliùs: adeò (quantum suspicor) aut uxor ejus efficieris, aut ancilla,_ &c.