Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 1.djvu/12

 translator has selected carefully, according to the best of her judgment; contributing such additions of her own as frequent visits to the principal galleries of Europe have enabled her to offer. A profound sense of what is due to her author, and a firm conviction that no writer should presume to place before the public anything short of the best that he can produce, have impressed on her the necessity of shrinking from no amount of labour required for the due performance of her task. The result she begs the reader, in the words of Vasari himself, to accept: “Not as what I would fain offer, but as what I am able to present.”