, and
adorning him with the approved guise of our stateliest English terms
(not diminishing, but more augmenting his artificial colours of absolute
poesy, derived from his first parents) cannot but be grateful to most
men's appetites, who upon our experience we know highly to esteem such
lofty measures of sententiously composed tragedies.

How much you shall make me and the rest of your private friends beholden
to you, I list not to discourse: and therefore grounding upon these
alleged reasons; that the suppressing of this tragedy, so worthy for the
press, were no other thing than wilfully to defraud yourself of an
universal thank, your friends of their expectations, and sweet Gismund
of a famous eternity, I will cease to doubt of any other pretence to
cloak your bashfulness, hoping to read it in print (which lately lay
neglected amongst your papers) at our next appointed meeting.

I bid you heartily farewell. From Pyrgo in Essex, August the eighth,
1591.

_Tuus fide & facultate_

GUIL. WEBBE.[3]

To the Worshipful and Learned Society, the GENTLEMEN STUDENTS of
the Inner Temple, with the rest of his singular good Friends, the
GENTLEMEN of the Middle Temple, and to all other courteous Readers,
R.W. wisheth increase of all health, worship, and learning, with
the immortal glory of the graces adorning the same.

Ye may perceive (right Worshipful) in perusing the former epistle sent
to me, how sore I am beset with the importunities of my friends to
publish this pamphlet: truly I am and have been (if there be in me any
soundness of judgment) of this opinion, that whatsoever is committed to
the press is commended to eternity, and it shall stand a lively witness
with our conscience, to our comfort or confusion, in the reckoning of
that great day.

Advisedly, therefore, was that proverb used of our elder philosophers,
_Manum a tabula_: withhold thy hand from the paper, and thy papers from
the print or light of the world: for a lewd word escaped is irrevocable,
but a bad or base discourse published in print is intolerable.

Hereupon I have endured some conflicts between reason and judgment,
whether it were convenient for the commonwealth, with the _indecorum_ of
my calling (as some think it) that the memory of Tancred's tragedy
should be again by my means revived, which the oftener I read over, and
the more I considered thereon, the sooner I was won to consent
thereunto: calling