Letters and literary life were dear to him, and yet he liked to think that he could live on equal terms with the young bloods of Rome, such as C[oe]lius.

As far as I can judge, he cared nothing for luxurious eating and drinking, and yet he wished to be reckoned among the gormands and gourmets of his times.

He was so little like the "budge doctors of the stoic fur," of whom it was his delight to write when he had nothing else to do, that he could not bear any touch of adversity with equanimity.

The stoic requires to be hardened against "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune." It is his profession to be indifferent to the "whips and scorns of time." No man was less hardened, or more subject to suffering from scorns and whips.

There be those who think proneness to such suffering is unmanly, or that the sufferer should at any rate hide his agony.