virtues which they necessarily practise, and consider them as
distinguished by prudence or fortitude, diligence or patience.

4. So much are the modes of excellence settled by time and place, that
man may be heard boasting in one street of that which they would
anxiously conceal in another. The grounds of scorn and esteem, the
topics of praise and satire, are varied according to the several
virtues or vices which the course of our lives has disposed us to admire
or abhor; but he who is solicitous for his own improvement, must not
suffer his affairs to be limited by local reputation, but select from
every tribe of mortals their characteristical virtues, and constellate
in himself the scattered graces which shine single in other men.

5. The chief praise to which a trader generally aspires, is that of
punctuality, or an exact and rigorous observance of commercial promises
and engagements; nor is there any vice of which he so much dreads the
imputation, as of negligence and instability. This is a quality which
the interest of mankind requires to be diffused through all the ranks of
life, but which, however useful and valuable, many seem content to want:
it is considered as a vulgar and ignoble virtue, below the ambition of
greatness, or attention of wit, scarcely requisite among men of gaiety
and spirit, and sold at its highest rate when it is sacrificed to a
frolic or a jest.

6. Every man has daily occasion to remark what vexations and
inconveniences arise from this privilege of deceiving one another. The
active and vivacious have so long disdained the restraints of truth,
that promises and appointments have lost their cogency, and both parties
neglect their stipulations, because each concludes that they will be
broken by the other.