wo productions! Yours is somewhat too licentious; and
young men, in whose nature, or rather in whose education and habits,
there is usually this failing, will read you with more pleasure than
is commendable or innocent. Yet the very time they occupy with you,
would perhaps be spent in the midst of those excesses or
irregularities, to which the moralist, in his utmost severity, will
argue that your pen directs them. Now there are many who are fond of
standing on the brink of precipices, and who nevertheless are as
cautious as any of falling in. And there are minds desirous of being
warmed by description, which without this warmth might seek excitement
among the things described.

I would not tell you in health what I tell you in convalescence, nor
urge you to compose what I dissuade you from cancelling. After this
avowal, I do declare to you, Giovanni, that in my opinion, the very
idlest of your tales will do the world as much good as evil; not
reckoning the pleasure of reading, nor the exercise and recreation of
the mind, which in themselves are good. What I reprove you for, is the
indecorous and uncleanly; and these, I trust, you will abolish. Even
these, however, may repel from vice the ingenuous and graceful spirit,
and can never lead any such toward them. Never have you taken an
inhuman pleasure in blunting and fusing the affections at the furnace
of the passions; never, in hardening by sour sagacity and ungenial
strictures, that delicacy which is more productive of innocence and
happiness, more estranged from every track and tendency of their
opposites, than what in cold, crude systems hath holden the place and
dignity of the highest virtue. May you live, O my friend, in the
enjoyment of health, to substitute the facetious for the licentious,
the simple for the extravagant, the true and characteristic for the
indefinite and diffuse.

* * * * *

_Boccaccio._ And after all this, can you bear to think what I am?

_Petrarca._ Complacently and joyfully; venturing, nevertheless, to
offer you a friend's advice.

Enter into the mind and heart of your own creatures: think of them
long, entirely, solely: never of style, never of self, never of
critics, cracked or sound. Like the miles of an open country, and of
an ignorant population, when they are correctly measured they become
smaller. In the loftiest rooms and richest entablatures are suspended
the most spider-webs; and the quarry out