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Updated: May 19, 2025
Flattery had not yet arrived at the degree of proficiency which it subsequently attained; but even then his flatterers boldly assured him he might take possession of St. Cloud for 25,000 francs. I told the First Consul that considering the ruinous state of the place, I could to say that the expense would amount to more than 1,200,000 francs.
For kings, though surrounded with flatterers and sycophants who seek to make them imagine themselves somewhat more than human, are but men, with all men's vain sins and passions, mad weaknesses and wild dreams; and when they love, they love as foolishly as commoners, and when they die, as die they must, there is no difference in the actual way of death than is known to a pauper.
"Although this fellow deserves to be with the flatterers beneath," said the Evil One, "natheless take him to his comrades in the cell of the liquid-poisoners, among the apothecaries and drugsters who have concocted drinks to murder their customers; boil him well for that he did not brew better beer."
With his every victory over his pagan rivals, Galerius, Maxentius, and Licinius, his personal leaning to Christianity and his confidence in the magic power of the sign of the cross increased; yet he did not formally renounce heathenism, and did not receive baptism until, in 337, he was laid upon the bed of death. He had an imposing and winning person, and was compared by flatterers with Apollo.
So much truth is there in Pope's epigram, that his lordship was capable at times of grovelling; witness his fulsome, though magnificent, dedication of the Advancement of Learning to King James the British Solomon, as his flatterers called him, to the amusement of the great Henry of France, who sneered, "Yes, Solomon the son of David," in allusion to his mother's familiarity with David Rizzio.
But this attempt met with a bolder resistance than the king's flatterers had led him to expect, and his despotic omnipotence was this time wrecked by the politic measures of William of Orange and the firmness of the states. By such measures, did Philip usher in his government of the Netherlands, and such were the grievances of the nation when he was preparing to leave them.
And you, herd of poets enslaved, who did not understand, who lived before you could understand, in an age when great men were only the domestics of great lords and you, too, servants of the resounding and opulent pride of to-day, eloquent flatterers and magnificent dunces, you unwitting enemies of mankind! You have all sung the laurel wreath without knowing what it is.
Here was this old creature at his side, surrounded by flatterers and adventurers, advancing through the world in splendid and jewelled raiment, with trumpets blowing before her, and poets singing her praises, and crowds applauding in the streets, and sneering in their own houses at the withered old virgin-Queen who still thought herself a Diana and all the while this triumphal progress was at the expense of God's Church, her car rolled over the bodies of His servants, and her shrunken, gemmed fingers were red in their blood; so she advanced, thought Anthony, day by day towards the black truth and the eternal loneliness of the darkness that lies outside the realm where Christ only is King.
This often greatly embarrassed honest men, as they neither wished to vie with the flatterers in praising him to his face, nor yet to appear to grudge him his due share of admiration. To bestow such excessive praise seemed shameful, while to withhold it was dangerous.
"It is not," he said, "fatal to our Liberal friends to labour for Free Trade, Extension of the Suffrage, and Abolition of Church Rates, instead of graver social ends; but it is fatal to them to be told by their flatterers, and to believe, with our social condition what it is, that they have performed a great, a heroic work, by occupying themselves exclusively, for the last thirty years, with these Liberal nostrums."
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