his
I hope that I acted as the duty of my station required, and with true
magnanimity. But on this occasion, and in many other parts of your
conduct, I must say, my dear nephew, there was a mixture of 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 cloth