sugared words--who carries in his hand a bouquet of flowers, and in
his face the complacent smile, addressing you in words which feed the
craving of vanity, and yet withal _seem_ words of sincere friendship and
sound judgment?

Where is the man who has the moral courage, the self-abnegation to throw
back honied encomiums which come with _apparent_ reality, although from
a flatterer? "To tell a man that he cannot be flattered is to flatter
him most effectually."

"Honey'd assent,
How pleasant art thou to the taste of man,
And woman also! flattery direct
Rarely disgusts. They little know mankind
Who doubt its operation: 'tis my key,
And opes the wicket of the human heart."

"The firmest purpose of a human heart
To well-tim'd artful flattery may yield."

"'Tis an old maxim in the schools
That flattery's the food of fools;
Yet now and then your men of wit
Will condescend to take a bit."

The Flatterer is a lurking foe, a dangerous friend, a subtle destroyer.
"A flattering mouth worketh ruin." "He that speaketh flattery to his
friends, even the eyes of his children shall fail." "A man that
flattereth his neighbour spreadeth a net for his feet." The melancholy
results of flattery are patent before the world, both on the page of
history and in the experience of mankind. How many thousand young men
who once stood in the uprightness of virtue are now debased and ruined
through the flattery of the "strange woman," so graphically described by
Solomon in Prov. vii., "With her much fair speech she caused him to
yield, with the flattering of her lips she forced him. He goeth after
her straightway, as an ox goeth to the slaughter, or as a fool to the
correction of the stocks; till a dart strike through his liver; as a
bird hasteth to the snare, and knoweth not that it is for his life"
(vers. 21-23). "She hath cast down many wounded: yea, many strong men
have been slain by her. Her house is the way to hell, going down to the
chambers of death" (vers. 26, 27).

And as the virtuous young man is thus led into ruin by the flattering
tongue of the strange woman; so the virtuous young female is sometimes
led into ruin by the flattering tongue of the lurking enemy of beauty
and innocence. I cannot give a more striking and pathetic illustration
of this than the one portrayed by the incomparable hand of Pollok:--

"Take one example, one of female woe.
Loved by her father, and a moth