Gleanings in Dialectics

I would testify, and I would affirm with an oath if it were necessary, that you have endured great labors and incurred great expenses to eventually procure for yourself the instruments for printing the liberal arts, not out of hope of profit and greed, but out of the highest benevolence, and rather out of piety toward studious men. You have finally supplied yourself with everything necessary for both languages referring to Latin and Greek. You have instruments fashioned with such art that you alone deserve to leave to posterity the forms of the most beautiful characters to imitate. For you easily surpass all craftsmen in both Roman and Greek letter forms. And as for the latter, Greece, the sweetest nurse of all good arts, which had nearly perished through sophistical chatter, will regain its ancient command through your care and diligence, already reviving through your genius. As for the others, if there are any that have not yet been printed, they will be given to the benefit of Latin men, and those that have already been printed by others will be made better; certainly, both will be achieved by your art. For this, all studious men will be perpetually indebted to you, and they will confess that they are indebted (unless they are entirely ungrateful). I, for my part, freely and openly confess that I am indebted to you. I have been greatly aided by you. I would be most ungrateful if I did not give thanks. But I will be even more indebted to you in the future if you take care that some of our work on dialectics and philosophy is published as soon as possible by your admirable skill. Do not refuse, even if they seem less adorned to you and less elaborated with care in speaking than to be worthy of being printed by your types. Nor should you consider it shameful to hand down wisdom stripped of eloquence, because I will have satisfied you very little in the matter of eloquence. This method is not of such value that you should be so deeply moved and deny your service to your greatest friend, since the same thing truly frees us both from calumny. For those things in which truth is primarily sought are less to be reproached (as Aristotle writes in his Rhetoric) if they are expressed with less art, since one should not look so much at the charm of a brilliant oration as one should attend to uncorrupted truth.