THEOGNIS, an elegiac poet of Megara; flourished in the second half of the 6th century B.C.; lost his possessions during a revolution at Megara, in which the democrats overpowered the aristocrats, to which party he belonged; compelled to live in exile, he found solace in the writing of poetry full of a practical and prudential wisdom, bitterly biased against democracy, and tinged with pessimism.

To his first bias longingly he leans; And rather would be great by wicked means.

This rather personalised essay, obviously biased and clouded by a string of personal experiences, seeks to narrate one person's run-ins into Goa's most long-serving editor.

If Rio and others, presumably biassed by the same theory, are inclined to see Lippi's moral depravity betrayed in every stroke of his brush, yet the more general and truer verdict accords him a place among the great masters of his age, albeit beneath Angelico and some others.

That we are so often deceived in others is not because our judgment is at fault, but because in general, as Bacon says, intellectus luminis sicci non est, sed recipit infusionem a voluntate et affectibus: that is to say, trifles unconsciously bias us for or against a person from the very beginning.