Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.4, 1865).djvu/338

 330 PHOCION. of due returns of honor and gratitude, obloquy and un- just surmises may often prevail, to weaken, in a consider- able degree, the credit of their virtue. It is commonly said that public bodies are most insult- ing and contumelious to a good man, when they are puffed up with prosperity and success. But the contrary often happens ; afflictions and public calamities naturally imbittering and souring the minds and tempers of men, and disposing them to such peevishness and irritability, that hardly any word or sentiment of common vigor can be addressed to them, but they will be apt to take offence. He that remonstrates with them on their errors, is pre- sumed to be insulting over their misfortunes, and any free spoken expostulation is construed into contempt. Honey itself is searching in sore and ulcerated parts ; and the wisest and most judicious counsels prove provoking to distempered minds, unless offered with those soothing and compliant approaches which made the poet, for instance, characterize agreeable things in general, by a word expres- sive of a grateful and easy touch,* exciting nothing of offence or resistance. Inflamed eyes require a retreat into dusky places, amongst colors of the deepest shades, and are unable to endure the brilliancy of light. So fares it in the body politic, in times of distress and humiliation ; a certain sensitiveness and soreness of humor prevail, with a weak incajiacity of enduring any free and open advice, even when the necessity of affairs most requires such plaindealing, and when the consequences of any single error may be beyond retrieving. At such times the conduct of public affairs is on all hands most hazardous. Those who humor the people are swal- and drink, bread and wine, receive wishes and desires." in Homer the epithet of menoeikes,
 * The feast, the banquet, meat " that meets and complies with the