human
Blessed are the peacemakers, --and a mutual friend, if well-disposed toward both opponents, generally has it in her power to effect a reconciliation, by repeating, kindly, any favourable remark she may chance to have heard one of the offended parties make on the other. In truth, we wish it were the universal custom for all people to tell other people whatever good they may hear of them--instead of the wicked and hateful practice of telling only the bad. Make it a rule to repeat to your friends all the pleasant remarks that (as far as you know) are made on them, and you will increase their happiness, and your own popularity. We do not mean that you should flatter them, by reciting compliments that are not true; but truth is not flattery, and there is no reason why agreeable truths should not always be told. There would then be far more kind feeling in the world. Few persons are so bad as not to have some good in them. Let them hear of the good. Few are so ugly as not to have about them something commendable even externally, if it is only a becoming dress. Let them hear of that dress. Flattery is praise without foundation. To tell a person with heavy, dull gray eyes, that her eyes are of a bright and beautiful blue; to talk of her golden locks to a woman with positive red hair of the tint called carroty; to tell a long, thin, stoop-shouldered girl, that she possesses the light and airy form of a sylph; or a short-necked, fat one that her figure has the dignity of an empress; to assure a faded matron that she looks like a young girl; to fall into raptures on listening to bad music, or when viewing a drawing that depicts nothing intelligible; or praising album poetry that has neither