Page:Plutarch - Moralia, translator Holland, 1911.djvu/80

58 should be ready to gape after other men's goods, who use to be so liberal and bountiful of your own?

Other flatterers there be, who like as painters do set up their colours and to give them more beautiful light and lustre unto them, lay near unto them others that be more dark and shadowy: so they, in blaming, reproving, reproaching, traducing and deriding the contrary virtues to those vices which are in them whom they mean to flatter, covertly and underhand do praise and approve those faults and imperfections that they have, and so in praising and allowing, do feed and cherish the same: As, for example, if they be among prodigal ding-thrifts and wasters, riotous persons, covetous misers, mischievous wretches, and such as have raked and scraped goods together by hook and crook, and by all indirect means they care not how: before them they will speak basely of temperance and abstinence, calling it rusticity: and as for those that live justly and with a good conscience, contenting themselves with their estate, and therein reposing sufficance, those they will nickname heartless and base-minded folk, altogether insufficient to do or dare anything. If it fall out that they converse and be in company with such as be idle lusks and love to sit still at home and do nothing, forbearing to meddle with ordinary affairs abroad in the world: they will not bash to find fault with policy and civil government, calling the managing of state matters and commonweal a thankless intermeddling in other men's affairs, with much travail and no profit. And as for the mind and desire to be a magistrate and to sit in place of authority, they will not let to say it is vainglory and ambition, altogether fruitless. For to flatter and claw an orator they will reprove in his presence a philosopher. Among light huswives that be wantonly given, they win the price, and are very well accepted, if they call honest matrons and chaste dames (who content themselves with their own husbands, and them love alone) rude and rustical women, untaught, ill bred, unlovely and having no grace with them.

But herein is the very height of wickedness, that these flatterers for advantage will not spare their own selves: For like as wrestlers debase their own bodies and stoop down low otherwhiles, for to overthrow their fellows that wrestle with them, and to lay them along on the ground; so in blaming and finding many faults with themselves they wind in and creep closely to the praise and admiration of others: I am (quoth one of them) a very coward, and no better than a very slave at sea; I can away with no labour and travail in the world; I am all