flowers, signifying that it consisted in the cutting off and keeping low of the nobility and grandees.  Ad placitum, are the characters real before mentioned, and words:  although some have been willing by curious inquiry, or rather by apt feigning, to have derived imposition of names from reason and intendment; a speculation elegant, and, by reason it searcheth into antiquity, reverent, but sparingly mixed with truth, and of small fruit.  This portion of knowledge touching the notes of things and cogitations in general, I find not inquired, but deficient.  And although it may seem of no great use, considering that words and writings by letters do far excel all the other ways; yet because this part concerneth, as it were, the mint of knowledge (for words are the tokens current and accepted for conceits, as moneys are for values, and that it is fit men be not ignorant that moneys may be of another kind than gold and silver), I thought good to propound it to better inquiry.

(4) Concerning speech and words, the consideration of them hath produced the science of grammar.  For man still striveth to reintegrate himself in those benedictions, from which by his fault he hath been deprived; and as he hath striven against the first general curse by the invention of all other arts, so hath he sought to come forth of the second general curse (which was the confusion of tongues) by the art of grammar; whereof the use in a mother tongue is small, in a foreign tongue more; but most in such foreign tongues as have ceased to be vulgar tongues, and are turned only to learned tongues.  The duty of it is of two natures:  the one popular, which is for the speedy and perfect attaining languages, as well for intercourse of speech as for understanding of authors; the other philosophical, examining the power and nature of words, as they are the footsteps and prints of reason:  which kind of analogy between words and reason is handled sparsim, brokenly though not entirely; and, therefore, I cannot report it deficient, though I think it very worthy to be reduced into a science by itself.

(5) Unto grammar also belongeth, as an appendix, the consideration of the accidents of words; which are measure, sound, and elevation or accent, and the sweetness and harshness of them:  whence hath issued some curious observations in rhetoric, but chiefly poesy, as we consider it, in respect of the verse and not of the argument.  Wherein though men in learned tongues do tie themselves to the ancient measures, yet in modern languages it seemeth to me as free to make new measures of verses as of dances; for a dance is a measured pace, as a verse is a measured speech.  In these things this sense is better judge than the art: 

“Coenae fercula nostrae
Mallem convivis quam placuisse cocis.”

And of the servile expressing antiquity in an unlike and an unfit subject, it is well said, “Quod tempore antiquum videtur, id incongruitate est maxime novum.”