vanity blended with your virtue which impaired and disgraced it.  Without that you would have been one of the worthiest men whom Rome has over produced, for none excelled you in sincere integrity of heart and greatness of sentiments.  Why would you lose the substance of glory by seeking the shadow?  Your eloquence had, I think, the same fault as your manners; it was generally too affected.  You professed to make Cicero your guide and pattern; but when one reads his Panegyric upon Julius Caesar, in his Oration for Marcellus, and yours upon Trajan, the first seems the genuine language of truth and Nature, raised and dignified with all the majesty of the most sublime oratory; the latter appears the harangue of a florid rhetorician, more desirous to shine and to set off his own wit than to extol the great man whose virtues he was praising.

Pliny the Younger.—­I will not question your judgment either of my life or my writings; they might both have been better if I had not been too solicitous to render them perfect.  It is, perhaps, some excuse for the affectation of my style that it was the fashion of the age in which I wrote.  Even the eloquence of Tacitus, however nervous and sublime, was not unaffected.  Mine, indeed, was more diffuse, and the ornaments of it were more tawdry; but his laboured conciseness, the constant glow of his diction, and pointed brilliancy of his sentences, were no less unnatural.  One principal cause of this I suppose to have been that, as we despaired of excelling the two great masters of oratory, Cicero and Livy, in their own manner, we took up another, which to many appeared more shining, and gave our compositions a more original air; but it is mortifying to me to say much on this subject.  Permit me, therefore, to resume the contemplation of that on which our conversation turned before.  What a direful calamity was the eruption of Vesuvius, which you have been describing?  Don’t you remember the beauty of that fine coast, and of the mountain itself, before it was torn with the violence of those internal fires, that forced their way through its surface.  The foot of it was covered with cornfields and rich meadows, interspersed with splendid villas and magnificent towns; the sides of it were clothed with the best vines in Italy.  How quick, how unexpected, how terrible was the change!  All was at once overwhelmed with ashes, cinders, broken rocks, and fiery torrents, presenting to the eye the most dismal scene of horror and desolation!

Pliny the Elder.—­You paint it very truly.  But has it never occurred to your philosophical mind that this change is a striking emblem of that which must happen, by the natural course of things, to every rich, luxurious state?  While the inhabitants of it are sunk in voluptuousness—­while all is smiling around them, and they imagine that no evil, no danger is nigh—­the latent seeds of destruction are fermenting within; till, breaking out on a sudden, they lay waste all their opulence, all their boasted delights, and leave them a sad monument of the fatal effects of internal tempests and convulsions.