Page:Plutarch - Moralia, translator Holland, 1911.djvu/70

48 up and second your song, with these and such-like responds: A brave mind (believe me) and beseeming a man of your worth and good parts: For to say a truth, this idle and private life, though it be pleasant, and have ease enough, yet it is but base, abject, and dishonourable; when you find him there once, muffle his nose immediately with this posy:

Good sir, methinks you soon do turn your style, You seem much chang'd from him you were erewhile.

I have no need of such a friend, that will alter as I do, and follow me every way (for my shadow can do that much better); I had rather have one that with me will follow the truth, and judge according to it and not otherwise. Avaunt, therefore, I will have nought to do with thee. Thus you see one way to discover a flatterer.

A second difference we ought to observe in his imitations and resemblances, for a true friend doth not imitate all that he seeth him whom he loveth to do; neither is he forward in praising everything, but that only which is best: For according to Sophocles:

In love he would his fellow be, But not in hate and enmity.

And verily one friend is ready and willing to assist another in well-doing and in honest life, and never will yield to be companion in lewdness, or help him to commit any wicked and heinous fact; unless peradventure through the ordinary conversation, and continual acquaintance together, he be tainted with infection of some ill quality and vicious condition, even against his will and ere he be well aware: much like as they who by contagion catch rheumatic and bleared eyes: or as the familiar friends and scholars (by report) of Plato did imitate him in stooping forward: and those of Aristotle in his stammering and maffing speech; and the courtiers of Alexander the Great in bending of his neck and rough voice when he spake.

For even so, some there be who receive impression of their manners and conditions at unawares and against their wills. But contrariwise, it fareth with a flatterer even as with the chameleon; for as he can take upon him any colour save only white; semblably, a flatterer cannot possibly frame himself to anything that good is and of importance: but there is no naughtiness and badness in the world which he will not quickly imitate. And well I may compare such fellows to ill painters, who when through insufficiency in their art they be not able to