be your friend or relation, or have known intimately some part of your
family. A man of this character is always open, though in a moderate and
calm degree, to the duties and ties of life. He will always do something
to serve his friend, his brother, or the man whose father pulled his
father out of the Serpentine. Affect with him no varnish; exert no
artifice in attempting to obtain his assistance. Candidly state your
wish for such or such a service, sensibly state your pretensions,
modestly hint at your gratitude. So may you deceive him once, then leave
him alone forever!



X.

The fond, silly, credulous man, all impulse and no reflection,--how my
heart swells when I contemplate this excellent character! What a Canaan
for you does it present! I envy you launching into the world with the
sanguine hope of finding all men such! Delightful enthusiasm of
youth,--would that the hope could be realized! Here is the very
incarnation of gullibility. You have only to make him love you, and no
hedgehog ever sucked egg as you can suck him. Never be afraid of his
indignation; go to him again and again; only throw yourself on his neck
and weep. To gull him once is to gull him always; get his first
shilling, and then calculate what you will do with the rest of his
fortune. Never desert so good a man for new friends; that would be
ungrateful in you! And take with you, by the way, my good young
gentlemen, this concluding maxim: Men are like lands; you will get more
by lavishing all your labour again and again upon the easy than by
ploughing up new ground in the sterile! Legislators,--wise, good, pious
men,--the Tom Thumbs of moral science, who make giants first, and then