With the flatterer it is different. In the first place, when he displays sharpness or heat or inflexibility, it is in dealing with others than yourself. He is severe upon his own servants; he is terribly hard upon the misdeeds of his own relations; he shows no admiration or respect for a stranger, but treats [Sidenote: E] him with contempt; his scandalizing is merciless when exacerbating other people. His object is to make it appear that he detests low practices, and that he would not consent to abate a jot of his candour in your behalf, or to do or say anything to curry favour. In the next place, when there is something really and seriously wrong, he pretends to be completely ignorant and unconscious of it, while he will pounce upon some little immaterial shortcoming and take it rigorously and vehemently to task—if, for instance, he sees an implement carelessly placed, or a fault of domestic management, or negligence in the cut of your hair or the wearing of your clothes, or lack of [Sidenote: F] proper attention to a dog or a horse. But should you slight your parents, neglect your children, humiliate your wife, despise your relatives, and waste your money, it becomes no business of his. In such circumstances not a word does he venture to utter, but he is like a trainer who permits an athlete to get drunk and dissipated, while he is severe upon him in the matter of an oil-flask or a scraping-iron; or like a grammar-master who scolds a boy for the state of his slate and pencil, but pretends not to hear his slips of grammar and expression. The toady is the kind of man who, in dealing with a ridiculously incompetent public speaker, has nothing to say about his matter, but finds fault with his voice-production, and blames him severely for spoiling [Sidenote: 60] his larynx by drinking cold drinks; or who, when requested to peruse some miserable composition, finds fault with the roughness of the paper and calls the copyist a slovenly wretch. It was so in the case of Ptolemy, when he made pretence to literary tastes. They would fight with him about some out-of-the-way word or bit of a verse or point of information, and would keep it up till midnight. But to his indulgence in cruelty and outrage, to his tambourine-playing and initiating, not one of [Sidenote: B] all their number offered any opposition. Imagine a man suffering with tumours and abscesses, and some one taking a surgeon’s knife and cutting—his hair or his nails! That is what the flatterer does. He employs his candour upon those parts which feel no pain or soreness.