Note 399a — APPENDIX

In 1610, in dedicating St. Augustine, Of the Citie of God to the Earl of Pembroke, Thorpe awkwardly describes the subject-matter as ‘a desired citie sure in heaven,’ and assigns to ‘St. Augustine and his commentator Vives’ a ‘savour of the secular.’ In the same year, in dedicating Epictetus his Manuall to Florio, he bombastically pronounces the book to be ‘the hand to philosophy; the instrument of instruments; as Nature greatest in the least; as Homer’s Ilias in a nutshell; in lesse compasse more cunning.’ For other examples of Thorpe’s pretentious, half-educated and ungrammatical style, see p. 403, note 2.