Mosella

pr. I had crossed the swift Nava with its misty stream, marvelling at the new walls added to ancient Vincum, where Gaul once matched the Latin disaster of Cannae and the helpless, unwept hordes lie scattered over the fields. Setting out from there through trackless wooded wilds, alone, and seeing no trace of human cultivation, I passed by parched Dumnissus amid lands thirsty on every side, and Tabernae, watered by an ever-flowing spring, and the fields of the Sarmatians, lately measured out to settlers. And at last on the first borders of the Belgae I catch sight of Noiomagus, the famed camp of the divine Constantine. Here the air over the plains is purer, and Phoebus, now clear of cloud, unbars purple Olympus with serene light. No longer, where the branches are interlaced in mutual bonds, is the sky sought for, shut out by green gloom; but the open daylight's free breeze does not grudge the beholder its clear radiance and ruddy brightness. Indeed, into a likeness of my homeland and the trim grace of shining Bordeaux all things struck me with their winning aspect: the rooftops of villas set high on the overhanging banks, the hills green with the vine, and the pleasant waters of the Moselle gliding below with a hushed murmur.

Hail, river, praised by the fields, praised by the husbandmen, to whom the Belgae owe the walls honoured with imperial rank! River, your vine-clad ridges planted with fragrant Bacchus, your grassy banks planted too, O greenest of rivers! Ship-bearing like the sea, you slope downward into your descending waters; like a river you flow, yet with your glassy depth you rival the lakes, and you can match the brooks with your quick course, and surpass the cold springs in the clearness of your draught. You alone possess all that a spring has, all that a brook and a river have, and a lake, and the tidal sea that ebbs back with twofold flow. You glide past with placid waters, and you suffer no murmur of the wind, no struggle of any hidden rock. You are not forced to hurry your rapid currents over a foaming shoal; nor, broken by jutting lands in mid-channel, do you let an island sever your excluded stream, lest it rob you of the honour of your rightful name. You have been allotted a double path: both when you glide down with the favouring current, so that the swift oars strike the troubled shallows, and when the sailors, the towrope nowhere slackening along the banks, strain the cables of the masts against their necks. How often do you yourself marvel at your own eddies in the stream, and think your lawful course flows almost too sluggishly? You do not fringe your bank with marsh-bred sedges, nor sluggishly drench your shores with foul mire: the footprints go down to the water's very edge and stay dry. Go now, and inlay your smooth floors with Phrygian marbles, stretching a marble plain through panelled halls! But I, scorning what wealth and riches have given, will marvel at the work of Nature, not at that ruinous extravagance in which a spendthrift poverty, glad to squander, runs riot. Here solid sands carpet the moist shores, and the pressed footprints keep no remembering shapes.

Gazing through the smooth surface into the glassy deep, the river keeps nothing hidden; and just as the kindly air spreads itself open to the unobstructed gaze, and no calm winds bar the eyes as they range through the void, so we discern things sunk far below, our sight enduring to the inmost depth, and the secret recess of the hidden deep lies open, when the shallows move gently and the flow of the clear waters reveals the shapes scattered in the blue light: how the furrowed sand ripples in a light eddy, how the bending grasses tremble on the green bottom. Down beneath the native springs the swaying water-weeds endure the quivering waters; the pebble now gleams, now hides, and the gravel sets off the green moss. Such is the whole shore that lies open to the Caledonian Britons, when the tide lays bare green seaweeds and red corals and the whitening pearls, the spawn of shells, men's delights; and beneath the wealthy waves the imitating necklaces counterfeit our own adornments. Not otherwise does the discoloured weed reveal, beneath the glad shallows of the placid Moselle, the variegated pebbles mingled there.

Yet the fish, gliding playfully to and fro, slippery shoals, weary the eyes that strain unceasingly in error. But it is neither permitted, nor does he allow it to whom the care of the second realm and the guardianship of the sea-trident has fallen, to set forth so many kinds, and their slanting swimming-courses, and the ranks that advance up against the stream, and the names and all the nurslings of the teeming stock. Do you for me, O Naiad, dweller on the river's banks, set forth the dances of the scaly throng, and tell over the bands that float in their blue stream beneath the clear channel.

The scaly chub gleams among the grassy sands, its very tender flesh stuffed thick with bones, and not fit for the table after twice three hours have passed. And the salar, star-spangled on its back with crimson spots, that will harm no one with the sharp point of its spine, the smooth trout that escapes the eye by its swift swimming. And you, harried through the gorge of the winding Saravus, where its six mouths roar among the rocky piers: when you have flowed down into a river of greater fame, more freely, O barbel, you ply your loose swimming. You are the better for being of the worse age; to you it has fallen, out of the whole number of living things, to enjoy an old age not without praise.

Nor would I pass you by, O salmon, ruddy with crimson flesh, whose broad tail's wandering lashes are carried up from mid-channel to the surface of the waters, when the hidden stroke is betrayed upon the calm surface. You are scaly upon your mailed breast, smooth in the forehead, and you shall make the dishes of an uncertain feast; you bear unspoiled through long delays the seasons, marked above all by the spots of your head, you whose lavish paunch hangs heavy and whose belly flows with fattened abdomen. And you, weasel-fish, who are caught throughout Illyricum and through the pools of the two-named Hister by the tell-tale foam of your swimming, brought up into our waters, lest the glad streams of the Moselle should be cheated of so celebrated a nursling. With what a natural colouring Nature has painted you! Black dots mark your back above, where a tawny ring runs round; a dark blue dye draws over your slippery back; to the middle of your body you grow plump and full, but from there onward, right to the very end of your tail, the dry skin is rough and scaly.

Nor will I keep silent about you, perch, delight of the table, worthy to be ranked among the sea-fish though river-born, the only one that can readily contend with the crimson red mullets; for neither is your savour dull, and in your solid body the portions join in sections, yet are kept apart by the bones. Here too is the pike, a laughing-stock even by its Latin name, the haunter of the pools, a foe most deadly to the querulous frogs, who besieges the dark lagoons amid sedge and mire, fit for no use upon the choice tables, and seething with its rank reek in the smoky cookshops.

Who would not know also the green tench, the common folk's comfort, and the bleak, the prey of boys' hooks, and the shad that hiss upon the hearths, the fare of the poor? And you, of two kinds and yet neither and both, who are not yet salmon nor any longer salar, and ambiguous in the midway of the two, O sario, caught while still of doubtful age! You too must be named among the river bands, O gudgeon, no bigger than two hands without the thumb, very plump, rounded, the more swollen for your egg-laden belly, and imitating, O gudgeon, the trailing beards of the barbel.

Now, O cattle of the waters, you shall be honoured, mighty sheatfish; you whose back is, as it were, anointed with Attic oil, and whom I take to be a river-dwelling dolphin: so you glide great through the channels, and scarcely uncoil the ranks of your long body, caught now in the shallow waters, now in the river's weeds. But when you set about your tranquil courses in the stream, the green banks marvel at you, the blue throng of swimmers marvel at you, the clear waters marvel at you: the swell spreads through the channel, and the outermost waves run forward over the margin. Such was once the whale in the Atlantic deep, when by wind or its own motion it is driven to the shores of the land: the sea, shut out, overflows, and great waters rise, and the neighbouring mountains fear to be diminished. Yet here, here our gentle whale of the Moselle is far from working ruin, and is an honour added to the great river.

Now that I have gazed enough upon the clear ways and the slippery ranks of fish, and have counted enough the manifold shoals, let the spectacles of the vine bring on another show, and let the gifts of Bacchus solicit the roving eyes, where the lofty summit, over a long ridge, and the cliffs and the sunny slopes of the height, its bends and hollows, rise up with vines as in a natural theatre. So does the kindly vintage clothe the ridge of Gaurus, and Rhodope and Pangaeus shine with their own Lyaeus; so the Ismarian hill grows green above the Thracian seas; so do my vineyards paint the golden Garonne. For along the highest ridges of the slope that stretches to the farthest part, the riverside margin is planted with the green Lyaeus. The folk glad in their toil and the hastening husbandmen now hurry on the topmost peak, now on the downward slope, vying with their stupid shoutings; thence the wayfarer, treading the ground beneath the banks, and here the boatman gliding by, sing their gibes at the laggard cultivators: the cliffs and the trembling wood and the hollow river ring back to them.

Nor does the scenery of the place delight men alone: here I could believe that even the rustic Satyrs and the grey-eyed Naiads gather on the farthest banks, when wanton mischief drives the goat-footed Pans, and they leap upon the shallows and terrify the trembling sisters beneath the stream, beating the water with their unschooled blows; and often Panope of the river, having stolen the grapes from the midst of the hills, flees amid her Oread friends from the wanton Fauns, the rustic powers. It is said, too, that when the fiery sun has stood in mid-orbit, at the common stream the Satyrs and the glassy sisters celebrate their shared dances together, when the more burning heat has granted hours secret from the gathering of men. Then the Nymphs sport, leaping over their own waters, and plunge the Satyrs in the shallows, and slip out, who know not how to swim, through their very hands, while they grasp at the slippery limbs of the deceiver and the watery waves yield to them in place of a body. But let it not be lawful for me to tell of these things, seen by none nor known to sight, except in part; let that hidden reverence be veiled, and lie concealed, entrusted to its own streams.

That sight may be enjoyed openly, when the grey-green river answers to the shaded hill, and the river-waters seem to put forth foliage, and the stream is planted with vine-shoots. What is that colour upon the shallows, when Hesperus has driven on the late shadows and bathes the Moselle from the green hillside! The whole ridge floats with rippling movements, and the absent vine-tendril quivers, and the vintage swells in the glassy waves. The boatman, deceived, counts up the green vines, the boatman floating over the waters in his hollow skiff, midway where the image of the hill mingles itself with the river, and the river joins the borders of the shadows.

How sweet, too, the shows these spectacles celebrate, when the oar-footed skiffs contend in mid-stream and run through their various windings, and along the green shores graze the budding shoots of the close-cropped meadows! To watch the nimble helmsmen exult at the sterns and the prows, and the youthful crew roaming over the river's surface, while the day passes by in watching: they set their serious business below their play; a new delight shuts out the old cares. Such are the games that Liber looks down upon in the Cumaean waters, when he goes over the planted ridges of sulphurous Gaurus and through the vineyards of the vapour-bearing Vesuvius; when Venus, glad at the Actian triumphs of Augustus, bade the wanton Loves play their fierce battles; such battles as the Nile's fleets and the Latin triremes waged beneath the citadels of Apollo's Leucas; or the Euboean boats recall the Mylasan perils of the Pompeian war over echoing Avernus; harmless clashings of the vessels and jesting fights, such as the blue sea renews under its green image while Sicilian Pelorus looks on at the naval show. No other aspect does their boyhood add to the wanton youths, both the river's youthful prime and the painted beaks of the gaily-coloured skiff. When the sun has bathed these in its Hyperionian heat, it gives back the sailors' forms beneath the glassy flood, and renders the bent shadows of the inverted body. And as they ply their nimble strokes to right and left and shift the burden with the changing oars, the wave gives back other sailors, watery semblances. The youthful crew themselves rejoice in their own image, marvelling that the deceiving shapes return upon the river. So, when a little maiden is about to display her ordered locks (when the nurse has first brought to her dear charge the wide-shining honour of the searching mirror), she gladly enjoys the unfamiliar sport and thinks she sees the form of a sister-girl: she gives the gleaming metal kisses that cannot be returned, or feels first at the fixed pins, or at the edge of her brow tries with her fingers to draw out the curled locks: such is the youthful crew, enjoying the mockeries of shadows, the ambiguous shapes of true and false.

Now indeed, where the bank affords easy approach, the plundering crowd searches the whole depth for the fish, alas! ill-defended in their inmost river. Here one, far off in mid-stream, drawing the dripping nets, sweeps up the shoals deceived by his knotted toils; but here, where the river slips by with tranquil flow, another draws his floating nets marked by cork; while that one, leaning forward over the waves cast down from the rocks, inclines the curved tip of his pliant rod, throwing in the hooks baited with deadly lures. When the wandering throng of swimmers, unaware of the trick, have seized them in their jaws, and through the inmost part of their gaping throat have felt too late the wounds of the hidden iron, while they struggle, the sign comes up, and the nodding reed answers the rippling quiver of the vibrating line; and without delay the boy, deft, snatches the shaken prey crosswise with a whistling stroke; the air takes the blow, as when whips are once driven through the void, the breeze cracks, and the wind hisses through the stirred air. The wet spoils leap upon the dry rocks, and dread the deadly shafts of the light-bringing day. To each, beneath its own stream, its vigour remained; in our air, made sluggish, it spends its life in panted breaths. Now the feeble beating throbs in the powerless body, now the numb tail suffers its last tremors, nor do the jaws close, but the gill, breathing out, gives back in its gasps the deadly breaths it has drawn. So, when the blast plies the smith's fires, the woollen shield, sporting with the beechen cavities, takes in and shuts off the winds through its alternate vent. I myself have seen some, trembling at the verge of death, gather their spirits, then, springing aloft, throw their bodies headlong down into the river beneath, regaining once more the waters they had despaired of. The thoughtless boy, ill brooking his loss, attacks them from on high and tries to grasp them with his stupid swimming. So Glaucus of Anthedon, through the Boeotian straits, after he had made trial by tasting of Circe's deadly herbs, and had taken up the grasses cropped by the dying fish, went, a new dweller, beneath the Carpathian sea. He, mighty with hooks and net, the searcher of hidden Nereus, wont to sweep the sea's Tethys, floated, a plunderer, amid the captive throngs.

Such sights do the villas look down upon, hanging on the rocks with their towering height, in a long line through the blue waters, which the river divides as it strays midway in its winding bends, and the mansions adorn the banks alternately. Who now would marvel at the Sestian sea, the strait of Helle daughter of Nephele, who at the channels of the Abydene youth? Who at the sea spanned from the Chalcedonian shore, the work of the great king, where the Euripus amid the waves forbids the lands of Europe and Asia to meet? Here there is no dread fury of the strait, no savage battles of the raging north-winds; here it is permitted to join the commerce of speech and to weave converse with answering stroke; the kindly shores mingle saving voices — voices and almost hands — and the echo, meeting the waves, carries back the resounding words from either side.

Who is able, unfolding the countless ornaments and fashions, to set forth through each several estate the architectural forms? Not the winged man of Gortyn would scorn this work, the builder of the Euboean temple, whom, as he tried to fashion in gold the fall of Icarus, a father's grief drove back; not Philo the Athenian, nor he who, praised by the enemy, drew out the famous contests of the Syracusan war. Perhaps too the famous toils of men and works had their place here: the hebdomad of Marcus, celebrated in his tenth volume; here flourished the arts of renowned Menecrates, and the admired hand of Ephesian Ictinus — or upon the citadel of Minerva — for whom the owl, smeared with magic dye, lures every kind of bird and destroys them by its gaze. Here perhaps was the builder of the Ptolemaic hall, Dinochares, for whom the pyramid itself rises into four-square peaks with a cone and consumes its own shadows; who, once bidden, because of a covenant of unhallowed love, suspended Arsinoe in the air of the Pharian temple — for the agate breathes its power through the vaulted roof and draws to itself the girl, breathed upon, with her iron-laden hair. These men, then, or men like them, it is fitting to believe set up the scenes of the dwellings in the land of the Belgae, having built lofty villas, the adornments of the river.

This one stands by nature high upon a mound of rock; this one is founded on the edge of the jutting bank; this one shrinks back and, in its bay, claims the captured river for itself. That one, holding a hill which towers most over the river, takes up easy prospects over cultivated and over rugged ground, and like a wealthy watchtower enjoys its own lands. Nay more, that one, set on its low foundation in the watered meadows, makes up for itself the natural goods of a lofty mountain, and, threatening with its lofty roof, breaks into the upper air, displaying a high tower, like the Memphian Pharos. It is the special privilege of this one to catch the fish enclosed in the fenced pool among the sunny clearings of the rocks. That one, resting upon the highest ridges, watches the streams gliding far below with a gaze now growing dim. Why should I tell of the halls set beside the greening meadows? Of the roofs gleaming above on countless columns? Of the baths that smoke, built up on the river's edge, when Mulciber, drawn within, rolls the panted flames through the hollow facings of the heated chamber, gathering the enclosed vapour with its breathing heat? I myself have seen men, wearied with the much sweat of the bath, scorn the pools and the cold of the fishponds, that they might enjoy the living waters; and soon, refreshed in the river, drive on the cool stream with splashing swimming. But if a stranger from the Cumaean shores were to be present here, he would believe that the Euboean Baiae had given their slender semblances to these places: so great is the elegance and brightness that allures, and the pleasure breeds no excess.

But what end at last is there for me of telling of your grey-green waters, and of recording the Moselle as worthy of the sea, since countless rivers far and wide rush into you through your various mouths? — though they could put off their courses, yet they hasten to consume their name in you. For both the Sura, aided by the flow of the Promea and the Nemesa, hastens, no degenerate stream, to go beneath your waters — the Sura, gratified by the intercepting of its tributaries, more nobly mingled beneath your name than if, with its mouth unknown, it strove with father Pontus. The swift Celbis, the Erubris bright with marble, hasten to lap you as soon as may be with their attendant waters: the Celbis, renowned for its noble fish; the other, whirling the corn-grinding stones in its headlong spin and dragging the shrieking saws over the smooth marbles, hears from either bank the unceasing din. I pass over the slender Lesura and the thin Drahonus, nor do I lay claim to the unscorned waters of the Salmona; the ship-bearing Saravus has long with its sounding mass called me with its whole robe — the river that put off its course far, so that, wearied, it might roll its mouth beneath the Augustan walls. Nor less than this is that which, gliding silently through the rich soil, the happy Alisontia grazes the fruitful banks. A thousand others, as each one's own impulse the more urges it, desire to be yours: so great is the eagerness of the hastening waters, or the custom. But if to you, divine Moselle, Smyrna had given its own bard, or famous Mantua, the Simois, renowned upon the shores of Ilium, would yield, nor would the Tiber dare to set its honours before yours. Grant pardon, grant it, mighty Rome! Let envy, I pray, be driven off and depart, and the Nemesis unknown to the Latin tongue: this better glory has fallen to you, Tiber, that you guard the seat of empire and the household gods of Rome.

Hail, great parent of crops and of men, Moselle! You the famous nobles, you the youth trained in war, you the eloquence that rivals the Latin tongue adorns; nay more, Nature has granted to your nurslings character and a glad disposition with serene brow. Not Rome alone displays her ancient Catos, nor does Aristides alone, that great beholder of the just and the fair, prevail and shed lustre on ancient Athens. But why, having ranged too far with loosened reins, overcome by love of you, do I wear down your praises? Put away, O Muse, your lyre, the highest strings being struck in this last song. The time will come, when, as I soothe my cares by the studies of an obscure leisure and cherish the sunny days of old age, the honour of the theme may commend me; when I shall sing one by one the deeds of the Belgae and the famous glories of their fathers' ways. The Pierides will spin for me soft songs on a fine thread and run over the webs fitted with thin woof: a purple too shall be granted to our spindles. Who then shall not be named by me? I shall record the peaceful husbandmen, and those shrewd in the laws and powerful in speech, a lofty defence for the accused; whom the senate-house saw as the highest chiefs of the townsmen and its own senate; whom the celebrated eloquence of the youthful school, while still wearing the boy's gown, brought to be praised alongside the old Quintilian; and those who governed their own cities and made their pure tribunal and their harmless axes illustrious, free of blood; or who held the peoples of Italy and the north-born Britons under a prefecture's title in the second rank; and him who governed Rome, the head of the world, both people and senators, almost under the foremost name — though he was the equal of the foremost. Let Fortune hasten at last to undo her error, and, making good the prizes she has barely tasted, render now the heights of true honour, to be claimed again by his noble descendants. But for now let the work begun be woven out, and, deferring the praise of these men, let me tell, in a glad course through the green countryside, of the happy river, and consecrate it in the waves of the Rhine.

Now, O Rhine, spread your blue bays and your robe green with crystal, and measure out the space of this new stream, you who must be heaped up by your brother's waters; and not in your waves alone is the prize, but in this — that, coming to the walls of the august city, it beheld the joined triumphs of son and father, the foe driven out beyond the Neckar and Lupodunum, and the source of the Hister, unknown to the Latin annals. This laurel of the war just brought low has only now come; hence it shall bear others and yet others. Go on together, you two, and drive forward the purple sea with your twin course; nor fear, most beautiful Rhine, to seem the lesser: the guest holds nothing of envy, you shall possess an everlasting name; do you, free of care for your fame, adopt your brother. Rich in waters, rich in Nymphs, a giver to both, your channel shall stretch out its partings with its twin banks, and shall open common ways through its various mouths. Strength shall be added, such as Francia and such as the Chamavi and the Germans may dread: then you shall be held a true frontier. So great a twin name shall accrue to you from so great a river; and though you flow, one, from your source, you shall be called two-horned. This I, drawing my race from a Viviscan origin, known among the Belgae by their hospitality and not by any new compact — I, Ausonius, a Latin name, by homeland and by household placed among the farthest Gauls and lofty Pyrene, where glad Aquitania tempers free-born ways — I sing, bold with my scant assurance. May it be lawful for me to have touched the sacred river with the slender libation of my Muse. Nor do I aim at praise; I ask pardon. You have many, O kindly river, who are wont to stir the sacred waters of the Muses and to drink dry the whole of Aganippe. But I, with however great a vein of my own waters shall offer itself — when Augustus, the father, and his sons, my greatest care, shall send me, adorned with the Ausonian fasces and the curule honour, back to Bordeaux, my homeland and the nest of my old age, after the duties of a service well discharged — I shall pursue more widely the praises of the northern river; I shall add the cities by which you glide in your silent channel, and the walls that look out upon you with their ancient ramparts; I shall add the strongholds founded for protection in doubtful times, but now, with the Belgae secure, not camps but granaries; I shall add the happy settlers on either bank, and you, amid the labours of men and oxen, grazing the banks and cleaving the rich tillage. Not to you shall the Loire prefer itself, nor the headlong Aisne, nor the Marne set as the boundary between Gauls and Belgae, nor the Charente itself, flowing back with the Santonican tide; you shall yield, O Dordogne, river rolled down from the cold mountain; and Gaul shall set the gold-bearing Tarn after you, and the Tarbellic Adour, rushing madly far and wide over the rolling rocks into the purple sea — yet only after the divine power of its mistress Moselle has been adored.

O horned Moselle, to be celebrated through foreign shores, and to be celebrated not in your own places alone, where at your topmost source you put forth the gilded honour of your bull's brow, or where you draw your placid courses, winding through the fields, or where you open your mouths beneath the German harbours: if any honour shall wish to breathe upon my slender Camena, if anyone shall deign to lose his leisure upon these Muses, you shall go upon the lips of men and be cherished with glad song. The springs and the living lakes shall know you, the blue rivers shall know you, and the ancient groves, the glory of the hamlets; you shall the Drone honour, you the Durance, uncertain with its scattered banks, and the Alpine streams, and the Rhone that flows through a double city and gives its name to the Right Bank; you I shall commend to the Garonne, blue with its pools, great with its sounding rivers, the Garonne of the sea.

ep. The Letter of Symmachus to Ausonius. Symmachus to Ausonius: You ask of me a longer letter. This is a sign of true love toward me; but I, conscious of my poor talent, prefer to study Laconic brevity rather than to publish the leanness of my childish speech in page upon page. Nor is it any wonder if the vein of my eloquence has run thin, since for a long while you have refreshed it with the reading of none of your poems nor of your prose volumes. Whence, then, do you demand the generous loan of my discourse, who have entrusted me with no literary interest? Your Moselle flits about through the hands and bosoms of many, consecrated by your divine verses; but it only glides past my own lips. Why, I ask, did you wish me to have no share in that little book? Either I seemed to you too unmusical to be able to judge, or surely malicious, in that I knew not how to praise. And so you have disparaged either my talent greatly or my character. And yet, against your prohibition, I scarcely came to the secret places of that work. I should like to be silent as to what I think; I should like to be vindicated by a just silence concerning you; but admiration for your writings breaks the sense of the injury.

I knew that river of yours, when long ago I accompanied the standards of the eternal emperors — a river equal to many, unequal to the greatest. This you have made for me, unawares, by the dignity of your famous verses greater than the Egyptian Nile, colder than the Scythian Tanais, and more renowned than this our common Tiber. By no means would I believe you, telling great things of the Moselle's source and course, did I not know that you would not lie even in a poem. Whence did you find those shoals of river-fish, as various in names as in colours, so differing in size and likewise in flavour, which you have dyed with the pigments of that poem above the gifts of nature? And yet, often present at your tables, when I marvelled at most other things that were then in esteem, set before us to eat, I never came upon this kind of fish. When were these fish born for you in a book, that were not on the platters? Do you think I am jesting and trifling? So may God prove me approved, as I add this poem of yours to the books of Maro. But now let me cease, forgetful of my own grief, to dwell upon your praises, lest you should turn even this to your glory — that we admire you while we are offended; though you may scatter your volumes and always except me, yet I shall enjoy your work — but by the kindness of others. Farewell.