e office or authority, and he shoots up his
neck to his fortune, and will not bate you an inch of either. His very
countenance and gesture bespeak how much he is, and if you understand him
not, he tells you, and concludes every period with his place, which you
must and shall know. He is one that looks on all men as if he were angry,
but especially on those of his 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 sawcy 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.

LXI.

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 r