The Story of the Two Days

You say that my book came into your hands two days before you wrote your letter to me, and that you therefore had no time to make a proper reply. Otherwise, if you had spoken against me after full thought and preparation, we might think you were hurling thunderbolts rather than accusations. But even so truthful a person as you will hardly be believed when you tell us that a merchant of Eastern goods, whose business is to sell what he has brought from these parts and to buy Italian goods to bring over here for sale, stayed only two days at Aquileia, so that you were forced to write your letter to me in a hurried, offhand way. For your books, which took you three years to put into finished form, are hardly more carefully written. Perhaps, however, you had no one at hand at the time to polish your sorry productions, and that is why your literary journey goes without the help of Pallas, and is broken up by faults of style at every turn, like rough places and chasms on a road. It is clear that this story about the two days is false. In that time you could not even have read what I wrote, much less replied to it. So it is evident either that you took a good many days to write your letter, which its elaborate style makes likely; or else, if this is your hasty style, and you can write so well offhand, you must be very careless in your writing to write so much worse when you have had time to think. [a]