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hint, but make it quite plain to you, that nothing could have given me greater pleasure than your letter.

³ But while the arguments you have assembled with such good taste and wealth of erudition are cogent aids to consolation, nothing is so cogent as my clear realization of the firmness and imperturbabillty of your spirit, and not to imitate it would, I feel, be most discreditable to me. I therefore claim to have more courage than even you yourself, who are my instructor in courage, in so far as you seem to me to have a definite hope that the present situation will some day improve. For obviously your "gladiators' risks and hazards"^[1] and those "analogous instances" of yours, besides the arguments strung together in your dissertation, were calculated to forbid my utterly despairing of the Republic. It is not, therefore, from one point of view, so surprising that you should have more courage than I, seeing that you have some hope to go upon, but from another, it is indeed surprising that you should entertain any hope at all. For what is there that has not been so grievously damaged, but that you might as well admit that it has been destroyed and annihilated? Look around at all the limbs of the state which are best known to you; not one will you find, I am sure, that has not been broken or incapacitated; and I should pursue the subject, if I either saw things more clearly than I know you do, or could talk about them without sorrow; and yet, according to your admonitions and instructions, all sorrow must be thrown to the winds.

⁴ My domestic troubles therefore I shall bear as you think it right I should, and the public troubles with