How, then, is he to be exposed? By what points of difference are we to prove that he is not, nor is on the way to be, our like, but only a pretender thereto? In the first place we must look for consistency and permanence in his principles. We must see whether he takes pleasure in, and gives praise to, the same things at all times; whether he directs and establishes his own life after one pattern, as a frank and free lover of single-minded friendship and fellowship ought to do. A friend does act in this manner. On the other hand, the time-server possesses no one fixed hearthstone to his character. He does not live a life [Sidenote: B] chosen for himself, but a life chosen for another. Moulding and adapting himself to suit others, he possesses no singleness or unity, but adopts all manner of varying shapes. Like water poured from one vessel into another, he is perpetually flowing hither and thither and accommodating himself to the form of the receptacle. The ape, we are told, is captured through endeavouring to imitate man by copying his motions in dancing. The time-server, on the contrary, is one who allures and decoys others. Nor does his mimicry take the same form in all cases. One person he will help to dance and sing: with another he will share a taste for wrestling and athletics. If he gets hold of a sportsman devoted to hunting, he follows his lead, and all but shouts, in the words of Phaedra, [Sidenote: C] _I long, ye Gods, to cheer the hounds Close-pressing on the dappled deer_, whereas he feels no interest whatever in the animal, but is setting his toils to catch the huntsman himself. If his next quarry is a young man with a taste for study and intellectual improvement, he is all for books, and grows a beard down to his feet; it is a case of wearing the philosopher’s cloak and his air of ‘indifference’,[50] and of prating about Plato’s ‘numbers’ and ‘right-angled triangles’. If, next, there happens along some easy-going bibulous person with plenty of money, _Then forthwith are his rags cast off by the wily Odysseus._ [Sidenote: D] Away goes the cloak; shorn off is the beard—’tis a crop that bears no corn: to the fore are wine-coolers and wine-cups, laughter in the streets and mockery of the philosophic student.