Page:Plutarch - Moralia, translator Holland, 1911.djvu/66

44 Well, in these respects above specified, hardly and with much ado is a flatterer discovered, and taken in the manner; much like unto those beasts who by nature have this property, to change their colour, and in hue to resemble that bodily matter or place whereon they settle, and which they touch. Seeing then it is so, that he is so apt to deceive folk, and lieth hidden under the likeness of a friend; our part it is, by unfolding the differences that are so hidden, to turn him out of his masking habit, and being despoiled of those colours and habiliments that he borroweth of others, for want of his own (as Plato saith), to lay him naked and open to the eye: let us therefore enter into this discourse, and fetch it from the very first beginning.

We have already said that the original of friendship among men (for the most part) is our conformity of nature and inclination, embracing the same customs and manners, loving the same exercises, affecting the same studies, and delighting in the same actions and employments: concerning which these verses well and fitly run:

Old folk love best with aged folk to talk, And with their feers young children to disport: Women once met, do let their tongues to walk, With sick likewise, sick persons best do sort: The wretched man his miseries doth lament With those whose state like fortunes do torment.

The flatterer, then, being well aware that it is a thing naturally inbred in us, to delight in those that are like ourselves, to converse with them, and to use and love them above all others, endeavoureth first and foremost to draw and approach, yea, and to lodge near unto him whom he meaneth to enveigle and compass, even as if he went about in some great pasture to make toward one beast, whom he purposeth to tame and bring to hand, by little and little joining close unto him, as it were, to be concorporated in the same studies and exercises, in the same affections, employments and course of life: and this he doth so long, until the party whom he layeth for, have given him some advantage to take hold by, as suffering himself gently to be touched, clawed, handled, and stroked; during which time, he letteth slip no opportunity to blame those persons, to reprove those things and courses of life which he perceiveth the other to hate: contrariwise, to praise and approve all that which he knoweth him to take delight in: and this he doeth not after an ordinary manner and in a mean, but excessively and beyond all measure, with a kind of admiration and wonder; confirming