George Buchanan

With industry I spread your praise.
With equal, you my censure blaze;
But, Zoilus, all in vain we do —
The world nor credits me nor you.

George Buchanan (Scots Gaelic: Seòras Bochanan; February 1506 – 28 September 1582) was a Scottish historian and humanist scholar.

Quotes

• Frustra ego te laudo, frustra me, Zoile, laedis:
  Nemo mihi credit, Zoile, nemo tibi.
  • With industry I spread your praise.
    With equal, you my censure blaze;
    But, Zoilus, all in vain we do —
    The world nor credits me nor you.
  • In Zoilum ('To Zoilus'), translated by Josiah Relph, A Miscellany of Poems (Glasgow, 1747), p. 115
  • Also translated by F. P. Barnard, A Fardel of Epigrams (1922), p. 53, no. 44:

    Though you I praise, you me abuse, 'tis vain:
    For we can neither any credence gain.

  • Hoyt Hopewell Hudson, The Epigram in the English Renaissance (Princeton UP, 1947), p. 115, identifies the original as itself a translation, from the seventh Epistola of Libanius, Lebanii Opera, ed. R. Foerster (Leipzig, 1921), vol. x, p. 3: Σὺ μὲν ἡμᾶς εἶπας κακῶς, ἡμεις δε καλῶς. ἀλλ᾽ οὔτε σοί τις οὔτ᾽ ἐμοὶ πείσεται.

• Mentitur veros facies tibi picta colores,
     Et speculi mendax te tibi imago referit.
  In digito annellus mentitur aëneus aurum,
     Mentitur gemmam vitrea gemma probam.
  Quicquid contigerit re cum mendacia discat,
     Miremur linguam dicere falsa tuam?
  •      There’s a lie on thy cheek in its roses,
           A lie echo’d back by thy glass.
         Thy necklace on greenhorns imposes,
           And the ring on thy finger is brass.
    Yet thy tongue, I affirm, without giving an inch back,
    Outdoes the sham jewels, rouge, mirror, and pinchbeck.
  • In Leonarum ('On Leonara'), translated by J. O. W. H. in Notes and Queries, 1st s., no. 53 (1 September 1850), p. 372