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Pliny · Epistulae IV

Pliny, Letter 4.20

Verdict on a friend's books

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1What I thought of each of your books individually I let you know as I finished reading each one; 1now hear what I judge of them all in general. 2It is a work that is beautiful, strong, keen, sublime, varied, elegant, pure, rich in figures, ample too and spread out greatly to your credit, a work in which you have been borne along on the widest-spread sails of genius and grief together; 2and each of these has been a help to the other. 3For genius added sublimity and grandeur to grief, and grief added force and bitterness to genius. 3Farewell.

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Pliny, Epistulae IV. Latin text: the Perseus digital text of Pliny's Letters, public domain; digital text from the Perseus Digital Library, CC BY-SA. Word analysis: drafted by our own tagger (trained on the hand-checked texts on this site), with every doubtful word checked by hand. English translation and section titles: written for this app, each checked against the Latin by a second reader.