Love-affairs are favourite ground for the flatterer to play upon his victim by further inflaming his passion. If he sees you at variance with your brothers, or neglecting your parents, or contemptuous towards your wife, he offers neither remonstrance nor reproach, but actually intensifies the bad feeling. ‘No: you don’t appreciate yourself,’ or, ‘It is you that are to blame, for always playing the humble servant.’ But if anger [Sidenote: 61] and jealousy provoke a tiff with a mistress of whom you are enamoured, in comes flattery at once with a fine blaze of frankness, and adds fuel to the fire by pleading cause and accusing the lover of all sorts of unloverlike, unfeeling, and unforgivable conduct: _O ingrate! after all that rain of kisses!_ Thus, when Antony was becoming passionately enamoured of the Egyptian queen, his friends did their best to persuade him that the love was on her side, and they upbraided him with being ‘cold and supercilious’. ‘The lady has forsaken all that royal state and that life of delightful enjoyments to go wandering [Sidenote: B] about on the march with you, like any concubine. _But, for thee, the heart in thy breast is past all moving or charming_, and you leave her to suffer as she will.’ It gratified Antony to be thus put in the wrong; no praise could please him like these accusations; and unconsciously he became perverted to the standard of the man who pretended to be reproving him. For candour of this kind is like the bite of a lascivious woman; while pretending to give pain, it arouses a provoking sensation of pleasure. Though unmixed wine is, generally speaking, a corrective of hemlock, yet, if you add it to that drug in the form of a mixture, [Sidenote: C] you make it impossible to counteract the power of the poison, the heat driving it rapidly to the heart. So, while aware that candour is a potent corrective of flattery, your rogue actually uses ‘candour’ as his instrument for flattering you. Bias was therefore wrong in his answer to the question: ‘What animal is the most dangerous?’ when he replied, ‘Among wild animals, the despot, among tame animals, the toady.’ It would have been truer to say that, among toadies, those who merely frequent your bath and your table are tame, while those who thrust the [Sidenote: D] tentacles of their slanderous and malicious meddling into bedchamber and boudoir are savage and unmanageable beasts.