_Modus_.—1. _Brevitas_.—Now for fashion: it consists in four things, which are qualities of your style. The first is brevity; for they must not be treatises or discourses (your letters) except it be to learned men. And even among them there is a kind of thrift and saving of words. Therefore you are to examine the clearest passages of your understanding, and through them to convey the sweetest and most significant words you can devise, that you may the easier teach them the readiest way to another man’s apprehension, and open their meaning fully, roundly, and distinctly, so as the reader may not think a second view cast away upon your letter. And though respect be a part following this, yet now here, and still I must remember it, if you write to a man, whose estate and sense, as senses, you are familiar with, you may the bolder (to set a task to his brain) venture on a knot. But if to your superior, you are bound to measure him in three farther points: first, with interest in him; secondly, his capacity in your letters; thirdly, his leisure to peruse them. For your interest or favour with him, you are to be the shorter or longer, more familiar or submiss, as he will afford you time. For his capacity, you are to be quicker and fuller of those reaches and glances of wit or learning, as he is able to entertain them. For his leisure, you are commanded to the greater briefness, as his place is of greater discharges and cares. But with your betters, you are not to put riddles of wit, by being too scarce of words; not to cause the trouble of making breviates by writing too riotous and wastingly. Brevity is attained in matter by avoiding idle compliments, prefaces, protestations, parentheses, superfluous circuit of figures and digressions: in the composition, by omitting conjunctions [_not only_, _but also_; _both the one and the other_, _whereby it cometh to pass_] and such like idle particles, that have no great business in a serious letter but breaking of sentences, as oftentimes a short journey is made long by unnessary baits. _Quintilian_.—But, as Quintilian saith, there is a briefness of the parts sometimes that makes the whole long: “As I came to the stairs, I took a pair of oars, they launched out, rowed apace, I landed at the court gate, I paid my fare, went up to the presence, asked for my lord, I was admitted.” All this is but, “I went to the court and spake with my lord.” This is the fault of some Latin writers within these last hundred years of my reading, and perhaps Seneca may be appeached of it; I accuse him not.