How a Man May Inoffensively Praise Himself Without Being Liable to Envy (19-20)

In the second place, the story of men’s prosperous actions naturally carries them into the humor of boasting; and joy so far transports them, that they swell with their own words when they would give you a relation of their victories or their success in the business of the state, or of their other publicly applauded actions or orations, and find it difficult to contain themselves and preserve a mean. In which kind of error it is observable that soldiers and mariners are most entangled. Nor is it infrequent with those who return from the government of provinces and the management of great affairs. Such as these, when mention is once made of illustrious and royal personages, presently thrust in some eulogies of themselves, as proceeding from the favor and kind opinion of those princes; and then they fancy they seem not at all to have praised themselves, but to have given only a bare account what great men have said honorably of them. So another sort, little different from these, think they are not discerned when they tell you all the familiarities of kings and emperors with them and their particular applying themselves

We see then what reason we have to look narrowly to ourselves, that, whilst we confer praises on others, we give no ground for suspicion that we make them but the vehicles of our own, and that, in pretending to celebrate Patroclus, under his name we mean romantically ourselves.

Further, that kind of discourse which consists in dispraising and finding fault is dangerous, and yields opportunity to those that watch it for the magnifying their own little worth. Of this old men are inclinable to be guilty, when, by chastising and debasing others for their vices, they exalt themselves as wonderfully great in the opposite virtues. Indeed to these there must be a very large concession, if they be reverend not only in age, but in virtue and place; for it is not altogether an unprofitable way, since it may sometimes create an extraordinary zeal and emulation of honor in those who are thus spurred up. But otherwise that sort of humor is carefully to be shunned; for reproof is often bitter, and wants a great deal of caution to sweeten and correct it. Now this is not done by the tempering our own praises with the reprehension of another; for he is an unworthy and odious fellow who seeks his own credit through any man’s disgrace, basely endeavoring to build a slight reputation of his virtue upon the discovery of another’s crimes.