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