without invective. But in complacency--for I am ready to use the word
which Terence furnishes--let pleasing truth be told, let flattery, the
handmaid of the vices be put far away, as unworthy, not only of a
friend, but of any man above the condition of a slave, for there is one
way of living with a tyrant, another with a friend. We may well despair
of saving him whose ears are so closed to the truth that he cannot hear
what is true from a friend. Among the many pithy sayings of Cato was
this 'There are some who owe more to their bitter enemies than to the
friends that seem sweet, for those often tell the truth, these never'.
It is indeed ridiculous for those who are admonished not to be annoyed
by what ought to trouble them, and to be annoyed by what ought to give
them no offence. Their faults give them no pain, they take it hard that
they are reproved,--while they ought, on the contrary, to be grieved for
their wrong-doing, to rejoice in their correction.

25 As, then, it belongs to friendship both to admonish and to be
admonished, and to do the former freely, yet not harshly, to receive the
latter patiently not resentfully, so it is to be maintained that
friendship has no greater pest than adulation, flattery, subserviency,
for under its many names [Footnote: Latin _multis nominibus,_ which some
commentators render "on many accounts" with reference to matters of
purchase and sale, debit and credit. But I think that Cicero brings in
_adulatio, blanditia, and assentatio,_ as so many synonyms of
_obsequtum,_ intending to comprehend in his indictment whatever alias
the one vice may assume.] a brand should be put on this vice of fickle
and deceitful men, who say everything with the view of giving pleasure,
without any reference to the truth. While simulation is bad on every
account, inasmuch as it renders the discernment of the truth which it
defaces impossible, it is most of all inimical to friendship; for it is
fatal to sincerity, without which the name of friendship ceases to have