Maybe someone will not hesitate to call this book verbose

Maybe someone will not hesitate to call this book verbose.
Maybe someone much more excellent will think
that only few things have been found here, while he himself found more.
The slow and impatient will think that this is much too obscure:
Books have their fates according to what the reader can grasp.
But I do not regret my judgment: it is good that I committed this
to you, who have both love and wisdom,
and in whom is always firmly planted your usual industriousness.
You I will follow, when you have examined this, that’s caution enough.
While I wrote this, I was sick for two times five months
and was hanging as an ambiguous body in the judging scales,
swaying in alternate directions, but not sinking down through either weight.
For neither did Death avidly open its black gaping holes
nor did the Parcae hold on to my life with a strong thread.
In that way such a long time led to the present day,
renewing the different pains, and always threatening without end.
Yet, when I could, I crept up and finished what I had begun,
so that, uncertain of my life, even so people could see I had lived.

Terentius Maurus, qtd. in Rita Copeland & Ineke Sluiter’s Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric.