Cornelii Valerii Ultraiectini In universam benedicendi [sic] rationem tabula, summam artis rhetoricae complectens

And indeed, it lay hidden among my papers, neglected until now. But behold, when I recently issued my Grammatical Institutions, in which I happened to make mention of our rhetoric table—because I thought I had not been negligent in explaining all the figures, both grammatical and rhetorical, and had arranged them quite suitably in a clear order—some learned men did not hesitate to demand it, and to remind me repeatedly of this debt. Therefore, I finally began to think about revising the text. To make it more profitable for students, it seemed appropriate to give that table the form of a book and to add to it a summary anacephaleosin recapitulation which would embrace the highest chapters of the entire art in a brief enumeration, similar to what we added to the dialectics about nine years ago. However, when that did not seem too long to me, I decided to publish it together with the booklet, with only a few things changed and some things transferred from there into the book. At that time, I had followed Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and some others among the ancients in my teaching (whose words I sometimes preferred to use rather than my own), and one or two from the more recent ones. I had collected what seemed most useful. Now, when I re-read them, they do not altogether displease me. And because some not-to-be-despised craftsmen of forming youth judge that these will be profitable to the young, and they often demand them from me, or rather beg for them, I easily allow this whatever usefulness there is, which was primarily intended for friends, to reach others also.

[The second column is truncated in the OCR, containing fragments of text related to the revision process and the desire to provide useful precepts to students.]