ay the
least attention to whether I am likely to get any return from him, for
I choose one who will be grateful, not one who will return my goodness,
and it often happens that the man who makes no return is grateful, while
he who returns a benefit is ungrateful for it. I value men by their
hearts alone, and, therefore, I shall pass over a rich man if he be
unworthy, and give to a good man though he be poor; for he will be
grateful however destitute he may be, since whatever he may lose, his
heart will still be left him.

XI. I do not fish for gain, for pleasure, or for credit, by bestowing
benefits: satisfied in doing so with pleasing one man alone, I shall
give in order to do my duty. Duty, however, leaves one some choice; do
you ask me, how I am to choose? I shall choose an honest, plain, man,
with a good memory, and grateful for kindness; one who keeps his hands
off other men's goods, yet does not greedily hold to his own, and who is
kind to others; when I have chosen such a man, I shall have acted to my
mind, although fortune may have bestowed upon him no means of returning
my kindness. If my own advantage and mean calculation made me liberal,
if I did no one any service except in order that he might in turn do a
service to me, I should never bestow a benefit upon one who was setting
out for distant and foreign countries, never to return; I should not
bestow a benefit upon one who was so ill as to be past hope of recovery,
nor should I do so when I myself was failing, because I should not live
long enough to receive any return. Yet, that you may know that to do
good is desirable in itself, we afford help to strangers who put into
our harbour only to leave it straightway; we give a ship and fit it out
for a shipwrecked stranger to sail back in to his own country. He leaves
us hardly knowing who it was who saved him, and, as he will never return
to our presence, he hands over his debt of gratitude to the gods, and
beseeches them to fulfil it for him: in the meanwhile we rejoice in the
barren knowledge that we have done a good action. What? when we stand
upon the extreme verge of life, and make our wills, do we not assign to
others benefits from which we ourselves shall receive no advantage? How
much time we waste, how long we consider in secret how much property we
are to leave, and to whom! What then? does it make any difference to us
to whom we leave our property, seeing that we cannot expect any return
from any one