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194 like naïveté and openness. "In all my life I never experienced so much pleasure as I do in the contemplation of my own incorruptibility. It is not so much the credit I get for it, though that is immense, as the thing itself which delights me. In a word it was worth while coming out here; I did not do myself justice, or recognise what I was capable of in this line. I do well to be puffed up. Nothing is more glorious." Just so with his literary compositions. "The passages from my orations which you commend seemed to me, I assure you, very fine, but I did not venture to say so before; now that they have your approval, I think them picked Attic every word." He is particularly pleased with his Greek history of his consulship. "I sent my memoir to Posidonius, that he might use it as the foundation of a more eloquent treatise on the same subject; but he writes back to me from Rhodes that, when he read my book, far from being encouraged to write, he felt himself fairly warned off the ground. Now you see! I have disconfited the whole tribe of Greeks, and so the lot of them, who used to press me for material which they might work up, have ceased to pester me." With the subject-matter of his treatise he is no less delighted, and it never occurs to him for a moment that he ought to conceal his delight. It is true that in requesting the historian Lucceius to take his consulship as the theme for a separate