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smuggled yourself into that old man’s will with all speed, you would be starving to death by now, and would be putting up your books at auction! The only remaining reason is that you have been convinced by your toadies that you are not only handsome and charming but a scholar and an orator and a writer without peer, and you buy the books to prove their praises true. They say that you hold forth to them at dinner, and that they, like stranded frogs, make a clamour because they are thirsty, or else they get nothing to drink if they do not burst themselves shouting.

To be sure, you are somehow very easy to lead by the nose, and believe them in everything; for once you were even persuaded that you resembled a certain royal person in looks, like the false Alexander, the false Philip (the fuller), the false Nero in our grandfathers’ time, and whoever else has been put down under the title “false.”^[1] And what wonder that you, a silly, ignorant fellow, were thus imposed upon and appeared in public holding your head high and imitating the gait and dress and glance of the man whom you delighted to make yourself resemble? Even Pyrrhus of Epirus, a marvellous man in other ways, was once, they say, so spoiled by toadies after the self-same fashion that he believed he was like the famous Alexander. Yet (to borrow a phrase from the musicians) the discrepancy