[355]. Hortatus es ut epistolas si quas paulo accuratius scripsissem colligerem ... Collegi.
[356]. ληκύθους. The word, whether from the use of its diminutive in the Frogs or not, seems to have become a stock metaphor for rhetorical tropes. It has even been compared to ampulla, though I fancy it was not quite so uncomplimentary, and meant “prettiness,” “conceit,” rather than “bombast.” Both, however, illustrate the view, put frequently in Book I. and here, as to the ancient conception of style.
[357]. If the reader is in ignorance of this worthy, he can cure his disease by any one of three pleasant medicines—Boswell, Horace Walpole, and Mr Austin Dobson’s Eighteenth Century Vignettes.
[358]. P. 16.
[359]. Ut aliæ bonæ res, ita bonus liber melior est quisque, quo major.
[360]. This letter contains an interesting mot of Aquilius Regulus, the brilliant and questionable orator-informer, of whom Pliny frequently speaks with a sort of mixture of admiration and dislike, reminding one of the way in which men used to speak of Lord Chancellor Westbury. “You,” said Regulus to him, “hunt out everything in your brief. I see the throat at once, and go for it”—ego jugulum statim video, hunc premo. There is some point in Pliny’s retort that people who do this not infrequently hit knee or ankle instead.
[361]. Not the great Attic; but an Assyrian rhetor of Pliny’s own time, supposed to be also referred to by Juvenal in the well-known phrase, Isæo torrentior (iii. 74).
[362]. Verba nuda.
[363]. There is another interesting critical remark at the end of the famous description of the villa (v.6): “I think it the first duty of a writer to read his own title, and constantly ask himself what he sat down to write, and to be sure that if he sticks to his subject he will never be too long, but will be hopelessly so if he drags other matters in.”
[364]. Non pati occidere, quibus æternitas debeatur.