It is a strange thing that most men, when they meet with a misfortune, cannot bear to be consoled, but are better pleased with those who will join in the lamentations; but when they are guilty of a blunder or a fault, if you make them feel the sting of repentance by means of a reproof or a reprimand, they think you an enemy and an accuser; whereas, if you eulogize their conduct, they regard you as a loyal friend and receive you with open arms. Now when people give you praise and applause for something [Sidenote: B] you do or say, whether in sober earnest or in careless jest, the harm they do is only for the moment, and only affects the matter in hand. But when their praises go so far as to influence your moral being, and their flatteries to affect your character, they are as bad as servants who pilfer ‘_not from the stack, but from the seed_‘. For the moral disposition and the moral character—first principle and fountain-head of conduct—are the seed of actions, and these they corrupt by clothing vice in the titles of virtue. Thucydides tells us that in the midst of war and faction ‘_the customary acceptation of words was arbitrarily changed to suit an end. Reckless daring came to be thought devoted courage; [Sidenote: C] cautious hesitation, an excuse for cowardice; moderation, weakness in disguise; complete insight, complete inertia_‘. So, when flattery is at work, we should warily note how prodigality is called ‘generosity’; cowardice, ‘caution’; light-headed caprice, ‘life and vigour’; meanness, ‘moderation’; the amorous man, ‘amiable and affectionate’; the arrogant and irascible person, ‘a man of spirit’; a poor meek creature, ‘civil and obliging’. [Sidenote: D] Remember, how Plato tells us that the lover—the flatterer of the beloved—calls a snub nose ‘piquant’, a hook-nose ‘regal’, a swarthy face ‘virile’, a white face ‘saint-like’, while ‘honey-colour’ is simply the coinage of a lover who indulgently invents a pretty name for pallor. Yet when an ugly man is persuaded that he is beautiful, or a little man that he is tall, his deception is short-lived, and the harm which he sustains is slight and easily repaired. But flattery may teach him to treat vices as if they [Sidenote: E] were virtues, and to rejoice in them instead of sorrowing. It may remove all sense of shame at misconduct. Such flattery spelled destruction to the Siceliots, when it called the cruelty of Dionysius and Phalaris a ‘hatred of wickedness’. It spelled ruin to Egypt, when it gave to Ptolemy’s effeminacy, to his hysterical superstition, to his shriekings and bangings of tambourines, the name of piety and worship. It came once within an ace of utterly subverting Roman morals, when it glossed over Antony’s dissolute and ostentatious self-indulgence with pretty terms as a ‘festive and genial appreciation of the boons of unstinted [Sidenote: F] power and fortune’. What made Ptolemy tie on the mouth-strap and its pair of flutes? What made Nero cultivate the tragic