To the Same, on His Kind Praise

When people love warmly, I doubt whether they can be impartial judges of the children of those they love. Justice is carried away by affection. Fathers imagine that their ugly boys are handsome, and sons do not see how plain their fathers are. Brother looks at brother in the light of affection rather than of nature. That is how I am afraid your holiness has judged what I have written, and that the sentence was passed by warmth of feeling. For truly the power of love is very great, and often it hides considerable faults in our friends. It is because you have so much of it, my dear friend, that you have crowned what I have written with your kind praises. All I can do is ask your piety to pray to the good Lord to confirm your praise, and to make the man you have praised something like the portrait painted in the words of those who admire him. [a]