When rulers keep the scales of justice true, and let them hang in even balance, they confer all kinds of benefits upon their subjects; if they are also gifted with prudence and further show loving-kindness to him that needs it, manifold advantages accrue from their rule to them that live under it. Having enjoyed these good things through your excellency, and having experienced them in your former administration, they have now been moved with joy at the information that to your munificence the helm of government has been entrusted. I pray that they may gain yet greater good, that your excellency may win still higher praise, and that the encomiums of your eulogists may be vindicated by the addition to all your other honourable titles to fame of that colophon¹⁶⁷⁷

1677 Colophon was one of the twelve Ionian cities founded by Mopsus on the coast of Asia Minor and was one of the claimants for being the birthplace of Homer. To put a colophon to anything became a proverbial expression for to put the crowning touch, to complete—from the fact according to Strabo (C. 643) that the Colophonian cavalry was so excellent as at once to decide and finish a battle in which it appeared. So the place and date of the edition of a book, with the device of the printer, appended to old editions is called a colophon.

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