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Pliny Richardson, having little taste for farming, and being ardently fond of fishing, rowing, and swimming, acted up to his reputation of being "a little mite odd," and took his whole twenty acres in water hence Pliny's Pond. The eldest Simpson boy had been working on a farm in Cumberland County for two years.
They have been taken by surprise enlarging their own panegyric, which might rival Pliny's on Trajan, for care and copiousness; or impudently veiling themselves with the transparency of a third person; or never prefixing their name to the volume, which they would not easily forgive a friend to pass unnoticed.
This bitter and pointed reference to his father's portly form, flushed face, and ever growing fondness for his brandies, was strangely unlike Pliny's courteous manner, and how it might have ended had not Miss De Witt suddenly determined on a conquest, I can not say. "Look, look!" she suddenly exclaimed, clapping her hands in childish glee. "The first snow-storm of the season.
The pear, though cultivated in classical times, appears, from Pliny's description, to have been a fruit of very inferior quality.
Such were some of Pliny's friends. His distinguished position at the Bar drew him a host of clients; his official status and his friendship with Trajan gave him the entree into any society he liked. He was, moreover, a man of considerable wealth, generous, even lavish, with his money, and his disposition was one of the kindest.
Pliny the younger, who was a finished reciter, grievously complains of the incivility shown to deserving poets. Instead of the loud cries, the uneasy motions that had attested the excitement of the hearers, nothing is heard but yawns or shuffling of the feet; a dead silence prevails. Even Pliny's gay spirits and cheerful vanity were not proof against such a reception.
The contrast between Pliny's fidgety indecision and the quiet strength and inexhaustible patience of Trajan, though scarcely what Pliny meant to bring out, is the first and last impression conveyed to us by this curious correspondence. The nine books of his private letters, though prepared, and in many cases evidently written for publication, give a varied and interesting picture of the time.
But Pliny has the unhappy talent of speaking truth in the accents of falsehood. Like Seneca, he strikes us in this speech as too clever for his audience. Still, with all its faults, his oratory must have made an epoch, and helped to arrest the decline for at least some years. It is on his letters that Pliny's fame now rests, and both in tone and style they are a monument that does him honour.
He did not feel at all inclined to grant Pliny's request, especially as he had a strong suspicion that it would be a long time before the sum would be returned. "Why do you apply to me, Pliny?" he asked, seriously. "Didn't your mother die and leave you a big property? Father says you must be worth more than a hundred thousand dollars."
Admiring the wonderful ingenuity with which the English writer had illustrated the place by his text, as if the houses were so many pictures to which he had appended a story, Clive, the wag, who was always indulging his vein for caricature, was proposing that that they should take the same place, names, people, and make a burlesque story: "What would be a better figure," says he, "than Pliny's mother, whom the historian describes as exceedingly corpulent, and walking away from the catastrophe with slaves holding cushions behind her, to shield her plump person from the cinders!
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