508 PEOSE HAIIEUTICS. 



practised it extensively, and there was one eminent class 

 of these female flatterers in particular called lady-ladders 

 (climacides), whose office it was to bend their backs for 

 patronesses to mount, on stepping in and out of their 

 carriages. (^) 



To be aU things to all men, that every man might be 

 all thiags to him, was, in what might be called the se- 

 cond stage of his development, the parasite's leading idea 

 and prime business : there was nothing, therefore, to be 

 either said or done, for the sake of a deipnon, at which he 

 would stick. He was a man of strong stomach, but weak 

 conscience ; and one of the corps had the efirontery and 

 irreverence to boast that he was in his conduct only a 

 careful imitator of Jupiter, who, whenever he smelt sa- 

 voury meat, or saw an open door and a table spread withiD, 

 woidd invite and make himself welcome, and after sup- 

 per leave the board without ever remembering to pay his 

 share of the reckoning. ' Don't be hard, my dear young 

 friend, upon us poor parasites,' deprecatingly whines an- 

 other of the body ; 'we are indeed a much-enduring race : 

 small returns for great labours — such is our lot ; no din- 

 ner one day, and if we feast on the morrow we are too glad 

 on the third to pick the bones of yesterday's glaucus, cold 

 and alone.' ' Cloudy and brief is our career,' says a fourth 

 sentimentalist of the same school ; ' age is slow in admit- 

 ting our advances, and youth treats us with its charac- 

 teristic levity and fickleness : thus neglected on all hands, 

 our fate is often that of the vernal flowers we emulate — 

 a premature decay and withering, for sheer want of a 

 proper pabulum and something to moisten our insides.' 

 ' Who,' asks a fifth weU-fed gentleman of this versatile 

 fraternity, — ' who so full of expedients as we are ? would 

 one of us dine out uninvited, he has only to go, in the cha- 

 racter of a 'fly,' and if repulsed from table and forced to 

 r\m for it, he can leap over a wall like a locust : see too 

 how accommodating we can be ; I, for instance, though 



