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which is worthy to be read. Besides, your work can without wounding their self-love instruct unlettered persons who are not prepared by any consciousness of eloquence for the service of the Republic[199]; and the experience which you have gained by being tossed to and fro on the waves of stormy altercation, they in their more tranquil lot may more fortunately make their own. Again (and here we make an appeal which your loyalty cannot resist), if you allow posterity to be ignorant of the numerous benefits conferred by your King, it is in vain that with benevolent eagerness he so often granted your requests. Do not, we pray, draw back once more into silence and obscurity those who, while you were sounding their eulogies, seemed worthy to receive illustrious dignities. For you then professed to describe them with true praises, and to paint their characters with the colours of history[200]. Now if you leave it to posterity to write the panegyric on these men, you take away as it were from those who die an honourable death the funeral oration to which, by the customs of our ancestors, they are entitled. Besides, in these letters you correct immorality with a ruler's authority; you break the insolence of the transgressor; you restore to the laws their reverence. Do you still hesitate about publishing that which, as you know, satisfies so many needs? Will you conceal, if we may say so, the mirror of your own mind, in which all ages to come may behold your likeness? Often does it happen that a man begets a son unlike himself, but his writings are hardly ever found unequal to his character[201]. The progeny of his own will is his truest child; what is born in the secret recesses of his own heart is that by which posterity will know him best. [Footnote 197: 'Regum quinetiam gloriosa colloquia pro magna diei parte in bonum publicum te occupare noverunt.' It is difficult to translate the expressive term, 'gloriosa colloquia.'] [Footnote 198: 'Ut fastidium sit otiosis exspectare quae tu continuo labore cognosceris sustinere.' I cannot translate this literally.] [Footnote 199: 'Rudes viros et ad Rempublicam conscia facundia praeparatos.' Surely some negative has dropped out of the latter clause.] [Footnote 200: 'Tu enim illos assumpsisti vera laude describere, et quodammodo historico colore depingere.'] [Footnote 201: 'Contingit enim dissimilem filium plerumque generari, oratio dispar moribus vix potest inveniri.'] [Side
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