Truth is offensive, if hatred, the bane of friendship is indeed born of it, but much more offensive is complacency, when in its indulgence for wrong doing it suffers a friend to go headlong to ruin. The greatest blame, however, rests on him who both spurns the truth when it is told him and is driven by the complacency of friends to self-deception. In this matter therefore there should be the utmost discretion and care, first, that admonition be without bitterness, then, that reproof be without invective. But in complacency--for I am ready to use the word which Terence furnishes--let pleasing truth be told, let flattery, the handmaid of the vices be put far away, as unworthy, not only of a friend, but of any man above the condition of a slave, for there is one way of living with a tyrant, another with a friend. We may well despair of saving him whose ears are so closed to the truth that he cannot hear what is true from a friend. Among the many pithy sayings of Cato was this 'There are some who owe more to their bitter enemies than to the friends that seem sweet, for those often tell the truth, these never'. It is indeed ridiculous for those who are admonished not to be annoyed by what ought to trouble them, and to be annoyed by what ought to give them no offence. Their faults give them no pain, they take it hard that they are reproved,--while they ought, on the contrary, to be grieved for their wrong-doing, to rejoice in their correction. 25 As, then, it belongs to friendship both to admonish and to be admonished, and to do the former freely, yet not harshly, to receive the latter patiently not resentfully, so it is to be maintained that friendship has no greater pest than adulation, flattery, subserviency, for under its many names [Footnote: Latin _multis nominibus,_ which some commentators render "on many accounts" with reference to matters of purchase and sale, debit and credit. But I think that Cicero brings in _adulatio, blanditia, and assentatio,_ as so many synonyms of _obsequtum,_ intending to comprehend in his indictment whatever alias the one vice may assume.] a brand should be put on this vice of fickle and deceitful men, who say everything with the view of giving pleasure, without any reference to the truth. While simulation is bad on every account, inasmuch as it renders the discernment of the truth which it defaces impossible, it is most of all inimical to friendship; for it is fatal to sincerity, without which the name of friendship ceases to have any meaning. For since the essence of friendship consists in this, that one mind is, as it were, made out of several, how can this be, if in one of the several there shall be not always one and the same mind, but a mind varying, changeful, manifold? And what can be so flexible, so far out of its rightful course, as the mind of him who adapts himself, not only to the feelings and wishes, but een to the look and gesture, of another?