GUILLAUME BUDÉ

TO THOMAS LUPSET THE ENGLISHMAN,

GREETINGS.

Decorative initial G featuring a putto among scrolling foliage within a square frame.

You have indeed earned great gratitude from us, most learned Lupset, for by handing me Thomas More's Utopia, you have turned me toward a reading that is at once most pleasant and likely to be useful. For although you had long contended with me by your pleas—that which I myself, of my own accord, was greatly desiring to do—that I should read the six books on the maintenance of health by Thomas Linacre, a physician most excellent in both languages Greek and Latin, which he recently gifted to Latinity from the monuments of Galen, or rather, to which he himself gifted Latinity, so that if all the works of that author (which I consider to be like all of medicine) should finally become Latin, the school of physicians might not seem to greatly desire knowledge of the Greek language. I ran through that book from Linacre's drafts with a hurried reading (the use of which I deem to be of the highest benefit, granted to me by you for a time), in such a way that I consider myself to have profited much from that reading; but I promise myself an even greater profit from the edition of the book that is now being diligently prepared by you in the workshops of this city. Since I believed myself to be sufficiently beholden to you for this reason...