o fatal, and run such a dangerous length, what may
not words spoken slyly, and secretly, and maliciously, be made to do?

A tradesman's reputation is of the nicest nature imaginable; like a
blight upon a fine flower, if it is but touched, the beauty of it, or
the flavour of it, or the seed of it, is lost, though the noxious breath
which touched it might not reach to blast the leaf, or hurt the root;
the credit of a tradesman, at least in his beginning, is too much at the
mercy of every enemy he has, till it has taken root, and is established
on a solid foundation of good conduct and success. It is a sad truth,
that every idle tongue can blast a young shopkeeper; and therefore,
though I would not discourage any young beginner, yet it is highly
beneficial to alarm them, and to let them know that they must expect a
storm of scandal and reproach upon the least slip they make: if they but
stumble, fame will throw them down; it is true, if they recover, she
will set them up as fast; but malice generally runs before, and bears
down all with it; and there are ten tradesmen who fall under the weight
of slander and an ill tongue, to one that is lifted up again by the
common hurry of report.

To say I am broke, or in danger of breaking, is to break me: and though
sometimes the malicious occasion is discovered, and the author detected
and exposed, yet how seldom is it so; and how much oftener are ill
reports raised to ruin and run down a tradesman, and the credit of a
shop; and like an arrow that flies in the dark, it wounds unseen. The
authors, no nor the occasion of these reports, are never discovered
perhaps, or so much as rightly guessed at; and the poor tradesman feels
the wound, receives the deadly blow, and is perhaps mortally stabbed in
the vitals of his trade, I mean his trading credit, and never knows who
hurt him.

I must say, in the tradesman's behalf, that he is in such a case to be
esteemed a sacrifice to the worst and most hellish of all secret crimes,
I mean envy; which is made up of every hateful vice, a complication of
crimes which nothing but the worst of God's reasonable world can be
guilty of; and he will indeed merit and call for every honest man's pity
and concern. But what relief is this to him? for, in the meantime,
though the devil himself were the raiser of the scandal, yet it shall go
about; the blow shall take, and every man, though at the same time
expressing their horror and aversion at the thing, s