ABSTRACT
On the vice of ingratitude in family and social bonds, both Sir Thomas Elyot and Pierre La Primaudaye wrote extensively, exploring the subtle psychological reasons for the envious time-server's betrayal of friendship in exchange for chances of preferment. Trading in gratitude was precisely what courtiers often did. This chapter shows how John Donne's expression of gratitude might be read as double-edged, and explores his rhetorical ingenuity in weaving his own restiveness into conventional pieces of compliment. In his laudatory letters to his patronesses, Donne's arguments show a deep awareness of the mechanics involved in writing to a superior. Commonly used, since its entrance in the English language, to denote duplicity and falsity, in Ancient Greek the word hypocrisy originally bore a distinctively different meaning. Francis Bacon's notorious suspicion towards the heuristic value of words brought him to stigmatise language as the idol of the market in Novum Organum.
