timelets | (no subject)

We demand of those who would paint fair and graceful features that, in case of any slight imperfection therein, they shall neither wholly omit it nor yet emphasise it, because the one course makes the portrait ugly and the other unlike its original. In p411 like manner, since it is difficult, nay rather perhaps impossible, to represent a man's life as stainless and pure, 480in its fair chapters we must round out the truth into fullest semblance; 5 but those transgressions and follies by which, owing to passion, perhaps, or political compulsion, a man's career is sullied, we must regard rather as shortcomings in some particular excellence than as the vile products of positive baseness, and we must not all too zealously delineate them in our history, and superfluously too, but treat them as though we were tenderly defending human nature for producing no character which is absolutely good and indisputably set towards virtue.

https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Cimon*.html