19
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 to them in discourse, and appear to recount them, not as thereby intending their own honor, but as bringing in considerable evidences of singular affability and humanity in persons so exceeding great.
19
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.
