As to the serious function of instruction which Theophrastus no doubt aims to combine with that of entertainment, there is no more skilful mode of inducing moral betterment than the discovery and exposure of the ludicrous. Most men would rather incur the charge of immorality than be exposed to the belittling laugh or derision of a community; they would rather be rogues than fools. The portrait-painter of moral life makes use of the ludicrous when he desires to catch the popular attention, and there is nothing, one may safely say, that makes society at large prick up its ears and fall to gossiping so much as a satire in which some well-known person is subjected to ridicule. [Sidenote: _Moral Folly_] Moral folly is much the same everywhere; it is only the fool’s costume that changes in different countries. The folly of the miser is seen in his cheating himself of the real goods of life and in robbing himself of the respect of his fellows; the folly of the coward, in gaining personal safety by losing reputation for manliness; the folly of the flatterer, in his shallow self-serving which men see through, while they nudge their fellows and laugh at his weakness; the folly of the vain man, in the way in which he assumes impressive proportions to his own magnifying eye, while to others his personality looks as small as it is; the folly of the tactless man, in consulting his own convenience rather than his neighbor’s, whereby he becomes a butt for his _gaucherie_; the folly of the boor, in his trampling awkwardly on the established usages of the polite world and thereby drawing upon himself the smilingly derisive attention of all observers. Throughout the list these characters represent some type of social foible or folly. [Sidenote: _The Literary Art of Theophrastus_] [Sidenote: _The Canons of his Art_]