6.  The vanity of being known to be trusted with a secret is generally one of the chief motives to disclose it; for however absurd it may be thought to boast an honour, by an act that shews that it was conferred without merit, yet most men seem rather inclined to confess the want of virtue than of importance, and more willingly shew their influence and their power, though at the expence of their probity, than glide through life with no other pleasure than the private consciousness of fidelity:  which, while it is preserved, must be without praise, except from the single person who tries and knows it.

7.  There are many ways of telling a secret, by which a man exempts himself from the reproaches of his conscience, and gratifies his pride without suffering himself to believe that he impairs his virtue.  He tells the private affairs of his patron or his friend, only to those from whom he would not conceal his own; he tells them to those who have no temptation to betray their trust, or with the denunciation of a certain forfeiture of his friendship, if he discovers that they become public.

8.  Secrets are very frequently told in the first ardour of kindness, or of love, for the sake of proving by so important a sacrifice, the sincerity of professions, or the warmth of tenderness; but with this motive, though it be sometimes strong in itself, vanity generally concurs, since every man naturally desires to be most esteemed by those whom he loves, or whom he converses, with whom he passes his hours of pleasure, and to whom he retires from business and from care.

9.  When the discovery of secrets is under consideration, there is always a distinction carefully to be made between our own and those of another, those of which we are fully masters as they affect only our own interest, and those which are deposited with us in trust, and involve the happiness or convenience of such as we have no right to expose to hazard by experiments upon their lives, without their consent.  To tell our own secrets is generally folly, but that folly is without guilt; to communicate those with which we are entrusted is always treachery, and treachery for the most part combined with folly.

10.  There have, indeed, been some enthusiastic and irrational zealots for friendship, who have maintained; and perhaps believed that one friend has a right to all that is in possession of another; and that therefore it is a violation of kindness to exempt any secret from this boundless confidence; accordingly a late female minister of state has been shameless enough to inform the world, that she used, when she wanted to extract any thing from her sovereign, to remind her of Montaigne’s reasoning, who has determined, that to tell a secret to a friend is no breach of fidelity, because the number of persons trusted is not multiplied, a man and his friend being virtually the same.

11.  That such fallacy could be imposed upon any human understanding, or that an author could have been imagined to advance a position so remote from truth and reason any otherwise than as a declaimer to shew to what extent he could stretch his imagination, and with what strength he could press his principle, would scarcely have been credible, had not this lady kindly shewed us how far weakness may be deluded, or indolence amused.