Two Apologies and Dialogue with Trypho

or, in whatever discipline fortune has placed them, they will trifle more and more each day until their very last breath. So the matter is, and as I believe, it always was and will be. The fault lies entirely not in the arts, but in the men; it is not the disciplines that corrupt us, but we who corrupt the disciplines and make them trifling.

As for the charge of arrogance, and that much-sung and universally celebrated critical pride, it is indeed difficult not to believe what all men say; but it is much more difficult, if I am not mistaken, to devise where this great kinship between criticism and pride could come from, or by what occult bonds nature could have coupled things so distant and so diverse. There is, indeed, a man in our republic who is a true critic, and he stands out so much among all those who are engaged in the study of letters that it should seem not at all strange if he himself is not unaware of his own dignity. And perhaps this is that pride about which they complain so loudly. As for me, I easily allow a man to do what no one can help doing; nor, if he knows what a man he is, and how great, and does not think that I am he whom I am not, do I deem that sufficient cause to hate the man and accuse him of pride and insolence. I judge, rather, that it is truly a mark of the deepest pride not to know one’s own excellence, but to be unable to bear that of another. And I believe I am speaking truly here, even if I speak with moderation regarding him whom his own virtue and na-
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