Letter 3010: This letter's text is heavily interspersed with critical apparatus notes.

I have taken up at the same time your twin letters, written, so to speak, by a Nestorian hand, whose weightiness I struggle to keep pace with. For the practice of our age draws us toward the niceties of a style aimed at applause. Therefore, with fairness, admit the tongue of our own century, and reckon it a good that this letter lacks Attic purity. It is right that this very confession of fault should profit me with you toward an easy pardon. But if you are impatient of novelty, take arbiters from the forum to decide whether pardon for style ought to be demanded of me or of you. Believe me, I shall earn more votes [reckoning-pebbles], not by equity and right, but because more people favor the faults that are common to all. And so, as you yourself sometimes proclaim, I alone remain to you as an observer of the old coinage; the rest are captured by the enticements of the ears. Let this compact, then, stand between us: that it please me to take the model of antiquity from your own autograph, and that you not regret bearing the novelty of my writings. I shall not pass over in silence the other gift of your little work, by which you have transferred the ancient commonwealth of each [people] from a Greek book into Latium. We had taken our arms from the Samnites, our insignia from the Etruscans, our laws from the household [hearth] of Lycurgus and Solon: your labor has added to us thereafter foreign monuments, which already do not know themselves [are forgotten by their own]. Now indeed our state has truly been made the parent of all peoples; for it can teach the several antiquities of each of them. But the material itself, worthy in its own right to be praised, with how great a gold of words is it bestarred? You could not say whether the honor of the volume rejoices more in its adornment or in its substance. Rumor has by no means deceived you concerning my illness, but already -- may there be pardon for the saying -- the harbor of recovery is opening to me. I have handed over to the boy [servant] the codex of your poems to be carried back, and because the order of the eclogues which we copied out was confused, I have sent it along at the same time, so that both a correction may be furnished by you to each, and the addition of the others which you are now composing. Farewell.