There is no inscription on the album page. Opposite the illustration in the 1607 "Emblemata", however, are the above title (a familiar saying) and the pertinent text: "Damnosa quid non imminuit dies? / Aetas parentum peior avis, tulit / Nos nequiores, mox daturos, / Progeniem vitiosiorem" (What do the ravages of time not injure! Our parents' age, worse than our grandsires', has brought forth us less worthy and destined soon to yield an offspring still more wicked). The text is from Horace, "Odes", Book III, 6, lines 45-48.
Netherlandish drawings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and Flemish drawings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Pierpont Morgan Library / Felice Stampfle ; with the assistance of Ruth S. Kraemer and Jane Shoaf Turner. New York : The Library, 1991, p. 93, no. 196.
Watermark: since the drawings are laid down, no watermarks, if any, are visible, even with fiber-optic light.
Engraved in reverse, 1607.
Also see records on Van Veen Album (III, 146-157).