But in my case, in all the many volumes I have published to date, in which I have praised so many in all sincerity, can you tell me anyone whose reputation I have damaged or besmirched in the slightest? What nation, class of person or individual have I ever censured by name? Yet you little know, my dear Dorp, how often I have been on the point of doing so under provocation from insults which no one should be expected to endure. However, I have always controlled my resentment and thought more of how posterity would judge me than of what the wickedness of my detractors deserved. If the true facts had been known to others as they were to me, no one would have judged me a too sharply censorious, but rather a just, restrained and reasonable man. Then I wonder why others concern themselves with my personal sentiments, or how any criticism of mine can have any influence on other countries or future times. I shall have done what was right for me, not them. Moreover, I've no enemy whom I wouldn't prefer to make my friend, if I could. Why should I bar the way to this, or write against an enemy what I might afterwards regret too late having written against a friend? Why should my pen blacken a character whose purity I could never restore even it were deserved? I would rather err on the side of praising the undeserving than castigating where blame is due. Unmerited praise passes for ingenuousness on the part of the giver, but if you paint in his true colours someone whose conduct calls for nothing but censure, this is attributed to your own sick judgement and not to his deserts. I'll say nothing here of how a serious war can sometimes break out as a result of injuries leading to reprisals and how a dangerous fire is often sparked off by insults bandied to and fro, but if it is unchristian to repay injury with injury, so equally is it undignified to work off resentment by exchange of abuse in the way women do.