s what construction he pleases.

[The Bouts-Rimes was a literary game popular in the 17th and 18th
centuries--the rhymed words at the end of a line being given for others
to fill up. Thus Horace Walpole being given, "brook, why, crook, I,"
returned the burlesque verse-- "I sits with my toes in a Brook, And
if any one axes me Why? I gies 'em a rap with my Crook, 'Tis constancy
makes me, ses I."]

383.--The desire of talking about ourselves, and of putting our
faults in the light we wish them to be seen, forms a great part of our
sincerity.

384.--We should only be astonished at still being able to be astonished.

385.--It is equally as difficult to be contented when one has too much
or too little love.

386.--No people are more often wrong than those who will not allow
themselves to be wrong.

387.--A fool has not stuff in him to be good.

388.--If vanity does not overthrow all virtues, at least she makes them
totter.

389.--What makes the vanity of others unsupportable is that it wounds
our own.

390.--We give up more easily our interest than our taste.

391.--Fortune appears so blind to none as to those to whom she has done
no good.

392.--We should manage fortune like our health, enjoy it when it is
good, be patient when it is bad, and never resort to strong remedies but
in an extremity.

393.--Awkwardness sometimes disappears in the camp, never in the court.

394.--A man is often more clever than one other, but not than all
others.

["Singuli decipere ac decipi possunt, nemo omnes, omnes neminem
fefellerunt."--Pliny{ the Younger, Panegyricus, LXII}.]

395.--We are often less unhappy at being deceived by one we loved, than
on being deceived.

396.--We keep our first lover for a long time--if we do not get a
second.

397.--We have not the courage to say generally that we have no faults,
and that our enemies have no good qualities; but in fact we are not far
from believing so.

398.--Of all our faults that which we most readily admit is idleness: we
believe that it makes all virtues ineffectual, and that without utterly
destroying, it at least suspends their operation.

399.--There is a kind of greatness which does not depend upon fortune:
it is a certain manner what distinguishes us, and which seems to destine
us for great things; it is the value we insensibly set upon ourselves;
it is by this quality that we gain the deference of other men, and it is
this wh