Life & Wisdom Quote by Walter Savage Landor

Unmerited praise is Landor’s elegant way of calling flattery a moral acid. The line turns the normal economy of compliments upside down: for an “ingenuous mind” (not naive, but candid, scrupulously honest), praise that hasn’t been earned doesn’t feel like a gift. It lands as accusation. If you’re being celebrated for what you didn’t do, the implied charge is that your real work can’t withstand scrutiny, or that the praiser thinks you can be bought with sweetness.

The sentence works because it locates conscience in the reflex. Landor doesn’t say the upright person “ought to feel” reproved; he says they do feel it, immediately, almost physically. “Bitterest reproof” is especially sharp: a compliment becomes the harshest critique precisely because it forces self-recognition. The target isn’t vanity so much as complicity. Accepting unmerited praise requires a small lie: letting others misread you, letting the record tilt.

Landor wrote in a culture saturated with patronage, salon approval, and reputational theater, where poets often depended on the right admiration from the right people. In that world, praise could be currency, and currency corrupts. The line is a compact ethics of attention: it demands that recognition track reality, not social convenience. It also doubles as a quiet threat to the flatterer. If the person you’re buttering up has any integrity, your compliment won’t charm them; it will expose you.