The Best of the Worlds Classics, Restricted to Prose | Page 3

exclude the
spleen, without fees, from the families they frequent. If they do not
prescribe physic, they can be company when you take it.
Very great benefactors to the rich, or those whom they call people at
their ease, are your persons of no consequence. I have known some of
them, by the help of a little cunning, make delicious flatterers. They
know the course of the town, and the general characters of persons; by
this means they will sometimes tell the most agreeable falsehoods
imaginable. They will acquaint you that such one of a quite contrary
party said, that tho you were engaged in different interests, yet he had
the greatest respect for your good sense and address. When one of these
has a little cunning, he passes his time in the utmost satisfaction to
himself and his friends; for his position is never to report or speak a
displeasing thing to his friend. As for letting him go on in an error, he
knows advice against them is the office of persons of greater talents
and less discretion.
The Latin word for a flatterer (assentator) implies no more than a
person that barely consents; and indeed such a one, if a man were able
to purchase or maintain him, can not be bought too dear. Such a one
never contradicts you, but gains upon you, not by a fulsome way of
commending you in broad terms, but liking whatever you propose or
utter; at the same time is ready to beg your pardon, and gainsay you if
you chance to speak ill of yourself. An old lady is very seldom without
such a companion as this, who can recite the names of all her lovers,
and the matches refused by her in the days when she minded such
vanities--as she is pleased to call them, tho she so much approves the
mention of them. It is to be noted, that a woman's flatterer is generally
elder than herself, her years serving to recommend her patroness's age,
and to add weight to her complaisance in all other particulars.
We gentlemen of small fortunes are extremely necessitous in this
particular. I have indeed one who smokes with me often; but his parts

are so low, that all the incense he does me is to fill his pipe with me,
and to be out at just as many whiffs as I take. This is all the praise or
assent that he is capable of, yet there are more hours when I would
rather be in his company than that of the brightest man I know. It
would be a hard matter to give an account of this inclination to be
flattered; but if we go to the bottom of it, we shall find that the pleasure
in it is something like that of receiving money which lay out. Every
man thinks he has an estate of reputation, and is glad to see one that
will bring any of it home to him; it is no matter how dirty a bag it is
conveyed to him in, or by how clownish a messenger, so the money is
good. All that we want to be pleased with flattery, is to believe that the
man is sincere who gives it us. It is by this one accident that absurd
creatures often outrun the most skilful in this art. Their want of ability
is here an advantage, and their bluntness, as it is the seeming effect of
sincerity, is the best cover to artifice.
It is indeed, the greatest of injuries to flatter any but the unhappy, or
such as are displeased with themselves for some infirmity. In this latter
case we have a member of our club, that, when Sir Jeffrey falls asleep,
wakens him with snoring. This makes Sir Jeffrey hold up for some
moments the longer, to see there are men younger than himself among
us, who are more lethargic than he is.

II
THE STORY-TELLER AND HIS ART[1]
I have often thought that a story-teller is born, as well as a poet. It is, I
think, certain, that some men have such a peculiar cast of mind, that
they see things in another light than men of grave dispositions. Men of
a lively imagination and a mirthful temper will represent things to their
hearers in the same manner as they themselves were affected with them;
and whereas serious spirits might perhaps have been disgusted at the
sight of some odd occurences in life, yet the very same occurrences
shall please them in a well-told story, where the disagreeable parts of
the images are concealed, and those only which are pleasing exhibited

to the fancy. Story-telling is therefore not an art, but what we call a
"knack"; it doth not so much subsist