[1] Read Isaiah vi. through carefully. [↑]
[2] The reader will perhaps now begin to see the true bearing of the earlier letters in Fors. Re-read, with this letter, that on the campaign of Crecy. [↑]
[3] I wish I could find room also for the short passages I omit; but one I quoted before, “As no one will deny that man possesses carnivorous teeth,” etc., and the others introduce collateral statements equally absurd, but with which at present we are not concerned. [↑]
[4] I must warn you against the false reading of the original, in many editions. Fournier’s five volume one is altogether a later text, in some cases with interesting intentional modifications, probably of the fifteenth century; but oftener with destruction of the older meaning. It gives this couplet, for instance,—
“Si n’avoit el plaisir de rien,
Que quant elle donnoit du sien.”
The old reading is,
“Si n’avoit elle joie de rien,
Fors quant elle povoit dire, ‘tien.’