Letters

Your learned pages, which I received while staving at Capua, brought me sheer delight. For there was in them a certain gaiety overlaid with honey from Tully’s hive, and some eulogy on my discourse Mattering rather than deserved. And so I am at a loss to decide which to admire the more—the graces of your diction or of your disposition. Indeed you so far surpass all others in eloquence that I fear to write in reply; you so generously approve my essays that I am glad not to keep silence. If I say more in your praise. I shall seem to be “scratching your back” and to be copying more than complimenting your address to me. Moreover, since you do nothing consciously for the sake of display, I must beware of praising your natural good qualities as though they were studied. This one thing, however, I must tell you as an absolute fact—that there is no man alive whom I love more than you, so deeply pledged in honest affection have you always held me.