“Let another man praise thee, and not thine own mouth; a stranger, and not thine own lips.” Our English adage, “Self-praise is no recommendation,” has its analogue in the Latin: _Laus in proprio ore sordescit_—“A man’s own laudation of himself is unseemly.” Another bit of good old Latin admonition is, to enlarge rather upon the praises of one’s friends, than upon one’s own: _Amicorum, magis quàm tuam ipsius laudem, prædica_; which seems to be, however, but a literal transcript of the second line in a couplet from the Greek Anthology: Ὑπὲρ σεαυροῦ μὴ φράσης ἐγκώμια· Φίλων ἔπαινον μᾶλλον ἢ σαυτοῦ λέγε. Syrus, again, utters the caution, “That whoso praiseth himself will soon find some one to laugh at him”—_Qui seipsum laudat, cito derisorem inveniet_. It was Æsop’s derisive counsel to an unreadable author, who did all his own praising and puffing, and therefore did it well—well, at least, in quantity, if not in quality—to stick by all manner of means to that home-brewed system; for it was the poor creature’s only chance of ever tasting the sweets of praise at all. “Ego, quod te laudas, vehementer probo, Namque hoc ab alio nunquam continget tibi.” In one of the wordy encounters between Shakspeare’s Beatrice and Benedick, the lady imputes signal unwisdom to the signor, when she tells him “There’s not one wise man in twenty that will praise himself.” Benedick scouts this as an old, old apophthegm, quite out of date; for, says he, “if a man do not erect in this age his own tomb ere he dies, he shall live no longer in monument than the bell rings, and the widow weeps.” And how long is _that_? Why, an hour in clamour (the bell), and (the widow) a quarter in rheum. Therefore, he infers, “it is most expedient for the wise to be the trumpeter of his own virtues, as I am to myself. So much for praising myself (who, I myself will bear witness, is praiseworthy).” Shakspeare often expatiates, with dramatic diversities of phase and aspect, of character and incident, upon this worldly-wise theme, by the worldly-wise held worthy of all acceptation, of every man his own trumpeter. To a few examples out of these many we may recur anon.