1.

Very few days have elapsed since the holy brethren of Rome sent to me the treatises of a certain Jovinian with the request that I would reply to the follies contained in them, and would crush with evangelical and apostolic vigour the ¹ Epicurus of Christianity. I read but could not in the least comprehend them. I began therefore to give them closer attention, and to thoroughly sift not only words and sentences, but almost every single syllable; for I wished first to ascertain his meaning, and then to approve, or refute what he had said. But the style is so barbarous, and the language so vile and such a heap of blunders, that I could neither understand what he was talking about, nor by what arguments he was trying to prove his points. At one moment he is all bombast, at another he grovels: from time to time he lifts himself up, and then like a wounded snake finds his own effort too much for him. Not satisfied with the language of men, he attempts something loftier.

²“The mountains labour; a poor mouse is born.”

³“That he’s gone mad ev’n mad Orestes swears.”

Moreover he involves everything in such inextricable confusion that the saying of ⁴ Plautus might be applied to him:—“This is what none but a Sibyl will ever read.”

To understand him we must be prophets. We read Apollo’s ⁵ raving prophetesses. We remember, too, what ⁶ Virgil says of senseless P. 347 noise. ⁷ Heraclitus, also, surnamed the Obscure, the philosophers find hard to understand even with their utmost toil. But what are they compared with our riddle-maker, whose books are much more difficult to comprehend than to refute? Although (we must confess) the task of refuting them is no easy one. For how can you overcome a man when you are quite in the dark as to his meaning? But, not to be tedious to my reader, the introduction to his second book, of which he has discharged himself like a sot after a night’s debauch, will show the character of his eloquence, and through what bright flowers of rhetoric he takes his stately course.