We can never say enough of the Pamphiluses; they are servile and timorous before princes and ministers; proud and overbearing to people who are merely virtuous; dumbfounded and embarrassed before the learned; brisk, forward, and positive before the ignorant. They talk of war to a lawyer and of politics to a financier; they pretend to know history among women, are poets among doctors, and mathematicians among poets. They do not trouble themselves about maxims, and less about principles; they live at random, are wafted onward and carried away by a blast of favour and the attractions of wealth; they have no feelings of their own, but they borrow them as they want them, and the person to whom they apply is neither a wise, able, nor virtuous man, but a man of fashion. (51.) We nourish a fruitless jealousy and an impotent hatred against the great and men in power, which, instead of avenging us for their splendour and position, only adds to our own misery the galling load of anotherʼs happiness. What is to be done against such an inveterate and contagious disease of the mind? Let us be satisfied with little, and, if possible, with less; let us learn to bear those losses which may occur; the prescription is infallible, and I will try it. Then I shall refrain from bribing a doorkeeper or from mollifying a secretary;[483] from being driven from the door by a large crowd of candidates and courtiers which a ministerʼs house[484] disgorges several times a day; from repining in an ante-chamber, from presenting to him, whilst trembling and stammering, a well-founded request; from bearing with his stateliness, his bitter laugh and his laconism. Now I neither hate nor envy him any more; he begs nothing of me, nor I of him; we stand on the same footing, unless perhaps that he is never at rest, and that I am. (52.) If the great have frequent opportunities of doing us good, they seldom wish to do so; and if they wanted to injure us it lies not always in their power; therefore the sort of worship we pay them may frustrate our expectations, if rendered from other motives but hope or fear. A man may sometimes live a long while without depending on them in the least, or being indebted to them for his good or bad fortune. We ought to honour them, as they are great and we little, and because there are others less than ourselves who honour us.