s acquaintance, whom he
beats off with a surlier distance, as men apt to mistake him, because
they have known him: and for this cause he knows not you 'till you have
told him your name, which he thinks he has heard, but forgot, and with
much ado seems to recover. If you have any thing to use him in, you are
his vassal for that time, and must give him the patience of any injury,
which he does only to shew what he may do. He snaps you up bitterly,
because he will be offended, and tells you, you are saucy and
troublesome, and sometimes takes your money in this language. His very
courtesies are intolerable, they are done with such an arrogance and
imputation; and he is the only man you may hate after a good turn, and
not be ungrateful; and men reckon it among their calamities to be
beholden unto him. No vice draws with it a more general hostility, and
makes men readier to search into his faults, and of them, his beginning;
and no tale so unlikely but is willingly heard of him and believed. And
commonly such men are of no merit at all, but make out in pride what
they want in worth, and fence themselves with a stately kind of
behaviour from that contempt which would pursue them. They are men whose
preferment does us a great deal of wrong, and when they are down, we may
laugh at them without breach of good-nature.

ACQUAINTANCE

Is the first draught of a friend, whom we must lay down oft thus, as the
foul copy, before we can write him perfect and true: for from hence, as
from a probation, men take a degree in our respect, till at last they
wholly possess us: for acquaintance is the hoard, and friendship the
pair chosen out of it; by which at last we begin to impropriate and
inclose to ourselves what before lay in common with others. And commonly
where it grows not up to this, it falls as low as may be; and no poorer
relation than old acquaintance, of whom we only ask how they do for
fashion's sake, and care not. The ordinary use of acquaintance is but
somewhat a more boldness of society, a sharing of talk, news, drink,
mirth together; but sorrow is the right of a friend, as a thing nearer
our heart, and to be delivered with it. Nothing easier than to create
acquaintance, the mere being in company once does it; whereas
friendship, like children, is engendered by a more inward mixture and
coupling together; when we are acquainted not with their virtues only,
but their faults, their passions, their fears, their shame.--and a