those who have hitherto written books of the sort deserve all the more
censure for writing without paying any attention to good taste or the
rules of art, by which they might guide themselves and become as famous
in prose as the two princes of Greek and Latin poetry are in verse."

"I myself, at any rate," said the canon, "was once tempted to write a
book of chivalry in which all the points I have mentioned were to be
observed; and if I must own the truth I have more than a hundred sheets
written; and to try if it came up to my own opinion of it, I showed them
to persons who were fond of this kind of reading, to learned and
intelligent men as well as to ignorant people who cared for nothing but
the pleasure of listening to nonsense, and from all I obtained flattering
approval; nevertheless I proceeded no farther with it, as well because it
seemed to me an occupation inconsistent with my profession, as because I
perceived that the fools are more numerous than the wise; and, though it
is better to be praised by the wise few than applauded by the foolish
many, I have no mind to submit myself to the stupid judgment of the silly
public, to whom the reading of such books falls for the most part.

"But what most of all made me hold my hand and even abandon all idea of
finishing it was an argument I put to myself taken from the plays that
are acted now-a-days, which was in this wise: if those that are now in
vogue, as well those that are pure invention as those founded on history,
are, all or most of them, downright nonsense and things that have neither
head nor tail, and yet the public listens to them with delight, and
regards and cries them up as perfection when they are so far from it; and
if the authors who write them, and the players who act them, say that
this is what they must be, for the public wants this and will have
nothing else; and that those that go by rule and work out a plot
according to the laws of art will only find some half-dozen intelligent