The elegance of the page would be diminished by notes.
Adjectis istiusmodi notis nitori paginae detractum fore existimavimus.
Notes from Wikiquote
Preface to Praelectiones Poeticae (1711) | The translation into English is given in Evelyn Tribble's "‘Like a Looking-Glas in the Frame’: From the Marginal Note to the Footnote", in The Margins of the Text, ed. D. C. Greetham (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 232, as reported in William W. E. Slights's Managing Readers (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2001), p. 8