Whom can a king trust who comes into His hearing? What man enters before Him but with some secret desire, passion, grievance or claim, which he employs all his artifice and guile to conceal? Who speaks the truth before a king? A man addresses Him either in fear for that which He may seize or in avarice for that which He may bestow. None comes before Him but as a suppliant. His heart’s business the flatterer speaks not aloud, but all he obscures beneath the cloak of dissemblance and dissimulation.
