What delicacy of compliment, coupled with nobility of sentiment, the fresh color of flattery not less, the rhetoric so graceful. One asks if our New-England reserve has added any graces to the Elizabethan courtliness, and if any feel quite at home in its tight costumes. Is it a want of taste if one is taken with such courtly compliments, lofty appreciation of character, such stately idealism, extravagant as it may appear, and bordering on insincerity? I wish my behavior, my letters, my address, may blush becomingly, court my friends' eyes as well as affections, by coy diffidences, win by lively phrase, telling how lovely presence is. Friendship is a plant that loves the sun,--thrives ill under clouds. I know temperaments have their zones, and can excuse the frigid manner of some in whose breasts there burns a hidden flame. There is a reserve that seems to fear the affections will be frosted by exposure, if not protected from any wind of acknowledgment. If "your humble servant" is written seldomer at the end of the letter, and "Sir" and "Madam" have dropped the once "Dear" and "My Dear"--used these adjectively for ceremony's sake,--the address has lost so much warmth and all the _abandon_ the words once implied. Must I withhold expressing all I would, lest I should seem to imply more than I meant? And has one nothing personal and private to communicate? It were not unbecoming to inquire if our Puritan culture still held us in check, life and literature were under eclipse, and the shadow threatening to become central and total. * * * * * Of celebrated letters, Pliny's are among the most delightful. A perusal of them refreshes and restores the old faith in persons and the possibilities of friendship. Alas for an age, if indifferent to this antique of virtue, the fair fellowships it celebrates, in the noble names of which he gives so many illustrious examples in his charming pages. Virtue seems something to be sought, to live and die for, every accomplishment a part of it, and a possession. I confess to a feeling, as I read, so modern and consonant to ideas and designs dear to me, that for the time I seem to recover brothers and friends--if it were not egotism to say it--in the aims and ends which I have so long loved and still cherish as life's pursuit and problem. A vein of noble morality pervades these letters which renders them admirable reading for all times and ages. And his allusions to his own life and pursuits, the glimpses he gives of his friends, commend his pages to all who seek virtue and wisdom at their sources. To his friend Paternus he writes with a tenderness and humanity to which the epithet Christian would add little.