1Since you are a model of family affection, and loved your excellent brother, who loved you dearly, with equal tenderness, and love his daughter as your own, and show her not only an aunt's affection but also that of the father she has lost, I do not doubt that it will be the greatest joy to you to learn that she is turning out worthy of her father, worthy of you, worthy of her grandfather. 2She has the greatest acuteness, the greatest thrift; 2she loves me, which is a sign of her purity. 2Add to this her interest in literature, which she has taken up out of affection for me.
2She keeps my little books, reads them over and over, even learns them by heart. 3What anxiety she feels when I seem about to plead a case, what joy when I have pleaded! 3She posts people to report to her what approval, what applause I have roused, what verdict I have won. 3She too, whenever I give a reading, sits close by, screened by a curtain, and takes in my praises with the most eager ears. 4She even sings my verses and sets them to the lyre, taught by no artist but by love, which is the best teacher. 5For these reasons I am led to the surest hope that our harmony will be lasting and grow greater day by day.
5For it is not my youth or my body that she loves, which little by little decline and grow old, but my glory. 6Nor is anything else fitting for one brought up by your hands, trained in your precepts, who has seen nothing in your household but what is pure and honourable, who in short grew used to loving me from your praise of me. 7For since you revered my mother in the place of a parent, you used, from my very boyhood, to form me, to praise me, and to foretell that I would be such as I now seem to my wife. 8So we vie with each other in thanking you, I because you have given her to me, she because you have given me to her, as if you had chosen us for each other.
8Farewell.