A Professor of Public Speaking (25)

I was bundled out neck and crop, yet even then I was not at a loss for the necessaries of life. No, I enjoy the name of a speaker, and prove myself such in the courts, generally playing false to my clients, although I promise the poor fools to deliver their juries to them.[*] To be sure I am generally unsuccessful, but the palm-leaves at my door are green and twined with fillets, for I use them as bait for my victims.[*] But even to be detested by everyone, to be notorious for the badness of my character and the still greater badness of my speeches, to be pointed out with the finger—‘ There he is, the man who, they say, is foremost in all iniquity!’—seems to me no slight achievement.

“This is the advice which I bestow upon you. By Our Lady of the Stews, I bestowed it upon myself long ago, and am deeply grateful to myself for it.”