Look at the ape. He cannot watch the house like a dog, nor carry like a horse, nor plough the ground like an ox. He is therefore the bearer of scurrilous insult and buffoonery and the butt of sport, his function being to serve as a tool for laughter. Precisely so with the toady. He is unequal to any form of labour and serious effort, and incapable of helping you by a speech, with a contribution, or in a fight; but in business which shuns the light he is promptitude itself—a most competent [Sidenote: F] agent in an amour, an adept at ransoming a strumpet, alert at checking the bill for a drinking-bout, no sloven in the ordering of your dinner, deft at attentions to your mistress, and, if you bid him show insolence to your wife’s relations or bundle her out of doors, he is beyond all pity or shame. This, therefore, is another easy means of finding him out. Order him to do any disreputable and discreditable thing you [Sidenote: 65] choose, and he is ready to spare no pains in gratifying you accordingly. A very good indication of the wide difference between our fawner and a friend may be found in his attitude towards your other friends. The one is delighted to have many others giving and receiving affection with him, and his constant aim is to make his friend widely loved and honoured. He holds that ‘_friends have all things in common_‘, and their friends, he thinks, [Sidenote: B] should be more ‘in common’ than anything else. But the other—the false, bastard, and spurious article—realizes, better than any one, how he is himself sinning against friendship by—so to speak—debasing its coinage. While, therefore, he is jealous by nature, it is only against his like that he gives his jealousy play, by striving to surpass them in grovelling and lickspittle tricks. Of his betters he stands in fear and dread, we cannot say because he is _Plodding on foot against a Lydian car_, but because, as Simonides has it, he _Hath not e’en lead To match the pure refinèd gold._