e same
time, if your whole thoughts are engaged on one incident and one person,
I can see in imagination how much fuller your material will be, and how
much more elaborately worked out. I am quite aware, however, what little
modesty I display, first, in imposing on you so heavy a burden (for your
engagements may well prevent your compliance with my request), and in
the second place, in asking you to shew me off to advantage. What if
those transactions are not in your judgment so very deserving of
commendation? Yet, after all, a man who has once passed the border-line
of modesty had better put a bold face on it and be frankly impudent. And
so I again and again ask you outright, both to praise those actions of
mine in warmer terms than you perhaps feel, and in that respect to
neglect the laws of history. I ask you, too, in regard to the personal
predilection, on which you wrote in a certain introductory chapter in
the most gratifying and explicit terms--and by which you shew that you
were as incapable of being diverted as Xenophon's Hercules by
Pleasure--not to go against it, but to yield to your affection for me a
little more than truth shall justify. But if I can induce you to
undertake this, you will have, I am persuaded, matter worthy of your
genius and your wealth of language. For from the beginning of the
conspiracy to my return from exile it appears to me that a
moderate-sized monograph might be composed, in which you will, on the
one hand, be able to utilize your special knowledge of civil
disturbances, either in unravelling the causes of the revolution or in
proposing remedies for evils, blaming meanwhile what you think deserves
denunciation, and establishing the righteousness of what you approve by
explaining the principles on which they rest: and on the other hand, if
you think it right to be more outspoken (as you generally do), you will
bring out the perfidy, intrigues, and treachery of many people towards
me. For my vicissitudes will supply you in your composition with much
variety, which has in itself a kind of charm, capable of taking a strong
hold on the imagination of readers, when you are the writer. For nothing
is better fitted to interest a reader than variety of circumstance and
vicissitudes of fortune, which, though the reverse of welcome to us in
actual experience, will make very pleasant reading: for the untroubled
recollection of a past sorrow has a charm of its own. To the rest of the
world, inde