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only by the weight of your public speeches and your voting in the Senate (quite enough for me, considering it was you), but also by your active assistance and your advice, by coming to my house and by interviewing my people, you left no act of courtesy for anybody else to do. Now all these efforts of yours are of far greater importance in my eyes than even the object you had in making them. For though the badges of virtue have been won by many a man who has no virtue in him, such sincere devotion on the part of such men as yourself can be won by virtue alone.
2 What I therefore promise myself as the fruit of our friendship is that friendship itself, and nothing can be more richly fertile than that, especially in those pursuits to which we are both of us deeply attached. I avow myself both your partner in politics, as to which our opinions coincide, and your comrade in every-day life, closely bound to you by the arts and studies we cultivate in common. I could have wished that it had so chanced that you could esteem my family as highly as I esteem every member of yours. And yet some sort of psychic prescience bids me not despair of even that.[1] But that has nothing to do with you; the responsibility lies on me. I should like you to be assured of this, and you will come to see it in time, that by this domestic revolution[2] a substantial addition has been made to my sincere regard for you (though no addition seemed possible) rather than that it has been in the slightest degree impaired. As I write this I hope you are already censor. My letter is so much the shorter, and, as it has to meet the eye of a master of morals,[3] more modest.