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But do not hide your virtues either.  I love those who are transparent water and who, as Pope¹⁵³ puts it, 'do not hide from view the turbid bottom of their stream'. But for them too there is a species of vanity, if a very rare and sublimated species: some of them desire tO display precisely this turbidity and count as nothing the transparency of the water that makes this possible. No less a person than Gautama Buddha invented this rare kind of vanity in the formula: 'let your sins be seen before the people and hide your virtues!' But to do this means to present the world with an ill spectacle  it is a sin against taste.