r hand to hand with anyone of them: 'tis only by
flights and little light attempts that I engage them; I do not grapple
with them, but try their strength only, and never engage so far as I make
a show to do. If I could hold them in play, I were a brave fellow; for I
never attack them; but where they are most sinewy and strong. To cover a
man's self (as I have seen some do) with another man's armour, so as not
to discover so much as his fingers' ends; to carry on a design (as it is
not hard for a man that has anything of a scholar in him, in an ordinary
subject to do) under old inventions patched up here and there with his
own trumpery, and then to endeavour to conceal the theft, and to make it
pass for his own, is first injustice and meanness of spirit in those who
do it, who having nothing in them of their own fit to procure them a
reputation, endeavour to do it by attempting to impose things upon the
world in their own name, which they have no manner of title to; and next,
a ridiculous folly to content themselves with acquiring the ignorant
approbation of the vulgar by such a pitiful cheat, at the price at the
same time of degrading themselves in the eyes of men of understanding,
who turn up their noses at all this borrowed incrustation, yet whose
praise alone is worth the having. For my own part, there is nothing I
would not sooner do than that, neither have I said so much of others, but
to get a better opportunity to explain myself. Nor in this do I glance
at the composers of centos, who declare themselves for such; of which
sort of writers I have in my time known many very ingenious, and
particularly one under the name of Capilupus, besides the ancients.
These are really men of wit, and that make it appear they are so, both by
that and other ways of writing; as for example, Lipsius, in that learned
and laborious contexture of his Politics.

But, be it how it will, and how inconsiderable soever these ineptitudes
may be, I will say I never intended to conceal them, no more than my old
bald grizzled likeness before them, where the painter has presented you
not with a perfect face, but with mine. For these are my own particular
opinions and fancies, and I deliver them as only what I myself believe,
and not for what is to be believed by others. I have no other end in
this writing, but only to discover myself, who, also shall, peradventure,
be another thing to-morrow, if I chance to meet any new instruction to
chang