What an art it is, to give, even to our nearest friends! and what a test of manners to receive! How, upon either side, we smuggle away the obligation, blushing for each other; how bluff and dull we make the giver; how hasty, how falsely cheerful, the receiver! and yet an act of such difficulty and distress between near friends, it is supposed we can perform to a total stranger and leave the man transfixed with grateful emotions. The last thing you can do to a man is to burthen him with an obligation, and it is what we propose to begin with! But let us not be deceived: unless he is totally degraded to his trade, anger jars in his inside, and he grates his teeth at our gratuity.
We should wipe two words from our vocabulary: gratitude and charity. In real life, help is given out of friendship, or it is not valued; it is received from the hand of friendship, or it is resented.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) Scottish essayist, novelist, poet

Essay (1888-03), “Beggars,” sec. 4 Scribner’s Magazine, Vol. 3, No. 3
    (Source)

Collected in Across the Plains, ch. 9 (1892).