Apologia pro Jul. Caesare Vanino

prepared through a long and most useful journey; these things always recommend you more seriously and more pleasantly, along with the splendor of your birth, but even more so your incredible humanity. No one who knows you and me will say I am flattering here, since I am both unequal to your praises and, by my nature, most distant from adulation. Having embraced a circular or complete education original: "circularem quasi eruditionem" of all sciences with an ample mind, you were so powerful in speaking that, though I was sometimes tired, as your somewhat unrefined guest throughout the whole day, I never departed satisfied. BEST OF MEN, it was my good fortune at one time to see you working with the Muses, and at another to hear you elegantly discussing various matters in your most well-equipped Library, of which you are the soul and the ornament.

When (as you rightly know) by chance a suspect book by VANINI, the Italian, titled On the Secrets of Nature original: "de Arcanis Naturae" fell into my hands, and you, according to common opinion, called him an Atheist and marked him with a black stone condemned him, by adding the names of the greatest men who agree with you, you forced out the faith due to such great names. However, lest anyone object, if I were to assert those things again, that I had hardly seen VANINI, much less read him; with your most kind consent I took his book with me and compared it with others: to some, profane monsters, foul portents, and the ambiguous form of a man or a beast appeared in it, or rather were believed out of fear.

But to one looking more accurately, the phantom disappeared, a happier face returned, and milder thoughts about VANINI arose, since hardly anyone can deny: that after he had died, his history was composed with recent hatreds. Tacitus, Annals, book 1, chapter 1, number 6; Histories, book 1, chapter 1, number 3. But when I brought what I had thought to your tribunal, MOST ILLUSTRIOUS VIR, you did not wish to pass judgment before I had committed my thoughts to writing. Therefore, I have committed them by your authority, and I now humbly offer those lowly trifles as a sign of the highest devotion. Receive them with a serene face, and do not disdain these things which will now see the public light, by your own light.