Pliny is not less complimentary to Sentius Augurinus. 'I have been listening,' he writes,[452] 'to a recitation given by Sentius Augurinus. It gave me the greatest pleasure, and filled me with the utmost admiration for his talent. He calls his verses "trifles" (_poematia_). Much is written with great delicacy, much with great elevation of style; many of the poems show great charm, many great tenderness; not a few are honey-sweet, not a few bitter and mordant. It is some time since anything so perfect has been produced.' The next clause, however, betrays the reason, in part at any rate, for Pliny's admiration. In the course of his recitation he had produced a small hendecasyllabic poem in praise of Pliny's own verses. Pliny proceeds to quote it with every expression of gratification and approval. It is certainly neatly turned and well expressed, but it is such as any cultivated gentleman who had read his Catullus and Martial might produce, and can hardly have been of interest to any one save Augurinus and Pliny. Pliny was, in fact, with all his admirable gifts, one of the principal and most amiable members of a highly cultivated mutual admiration society. He was a poet himself, though only a few lines of the poems praised by Augurinus have survived to undergo the judgement of a more critical age. Pliny has, however, given an interesting little sketch of his poetical career in the fourth letter of the seventh book. 'I have always had a taste for poetry,' he tells his friend Pontius; 'nay, I was only fourteen when I composed a tragedy in Greek. What was it like? you ask. I know not; it was called a tragedy. Later, when returning from my military service, I was weather-bound in the island of Icaria, and wrote elegiac poems in Latin about that island and the sea, which bears the same name. I have occasionally attempted heroic hexameters, but it is only quite recently that I have taken to writing hendecasyllables. You shall hear of their origin and of the occasion which gave them birth. Some writings of Asinius Gallus were being read aloud to me in my Laurentine villa; in these works he was comparing his father with Cicero; we came upon an epigram of Cicero dedicated to his freedman Tiro. Shortly after, about noon--for it was summer--I retired to take my siesta, and finding that I could not sleep, I began to reflect how the very greatest orators have taken delight in composing this style of verse, and have hoped to win fame thereby. I set my mind to it, and, quite contrary to my expectations after so long desuetude, produced in an extremely short space of time the following verses on that very subject which had provoked me to write.' Thirteen hexameter verses follow of a mildly erotic character. They are not peculiarly edifying, and are certainly very far from being poetry. He continues: