Chapter 4

You have appointed, and will appoint others also as consuls, most kindly Gratian, but never on similar grounds. Men of military renown: and as these are always associated with you in the toils of empire, so they, in common with you, hold the greater share in its distinctions, having been your colleagues in soldierly virtue before they became so in civil dignities; men of ancient and famous lineage: for an illustrious name secures much, and distinction may serve as a substitute for achievements; men distinguished for their trustworthiness and tested by official duties: and though I do not place myself outside this category, yet, so tar as the path to honours is concerned, I differ in my qualifications. And to this new favour of yours, your Majesty, you add a fourth degree,1 in that you disparage yourself to do another honour, give the credit of the excellences of your mind to the effieacy of exterior influence, and with greater generosity than truth, misrepresent those natural accomplishments which you owe to God, to your father, and to yourself as the product of a stranger's efforts. Your own words written to me in your own hand declare: that you are discharging a debt which yon owe, and still owe what yon hare discharged. Oh, how that sentence is overlaid with the gold of your nature! How sustaining is the milk of these words, springing from the sincerest of breasts! Is there anyone who shrinks so modestly from arrogant display of his generosity? Anyone who thus alleges that his favours have no other weight but the receiver's work? Anyone who, in a word, prefers to call his gifts payment as though rendered by a debtor? Let those famous spokesmen of old, those orators of Homer—Menelaus, with his subdued but subtle mode of speech, the chieftain of Ithaca, so like a heavy storm of hail, Nestor, the survivor of three generations, whose lips were steeped in honey—let those seek to rival such a sentence! Yet for all his compression and Spartan conciseness, the first will utter nothing neater; the second, though he heap up words and ideas, nothing more forcible; the last, nothing sweeter, although his gentle speech persuaded rather by charming than overbearing. You say that you are paying a debt you owe and will still be in debt when you have paid. My young sovereign, may He who is the Ruler of heaven and of mankind grant that you may excel those ancients, even above whom the choiceness of that one sentence has placed you, and outstrip each one of them in his peculiar quality—Menelaus in kingly majesty, Ulysses in discretion, and Nestor in length of days.