him so far before all other animals in the matter of falsehood, that he may not be inadequately defined a lying animal.

The natural propriety of lying, physiologically considered, reposes not merely on the development of imagination to conceive, and of a tongue to utter "the thing which is not;"-a lie is no lie, unless it is believed. To ensure this result, nature has endowed the species with extensive powers of expression, with outward and visible signs impressed on the countenance and bearing of the whole body, which, by an inevitable law, suggest to the beholder a belief in the existence of the internal affection with which they are associated.

We need not say that it is on the muscular habits induced by an habitual indulgence in any particular passion, that the science of Lavater is principally founded. To these signs men are so strongly impelled to trust, that it is only by the greatest efforts, and under the guidance of the severest experience, they acquire the power of resisting their influence.

This is the stronghold of the habitual liar. By dint of practice, he attains such a command over his muscles, as enables him, if not altogether to suppress the natural expression of the passions he really feels, at least to counterfeit it in all cases where he desires to affect a particular feeling. Nor does the benefit thence derived confine itself to begetting a necessary credulity in the hearer; it extends also to exciting a sympathetic passion, by which the liar ensures not only the requisite convictions, but determines likewise the specific action, which he desires should result from the belief. "Si vis me flere," says Horace, "dolendum est primum ipsi tibi ;" that is, if you wish to excite my compassion, you must not only say you are starving, but must also look hungry with all your might and main.

The habitual practice of false external demonstrations, forms the essence of what is called hypocrisy; which the unlearned should know is only a Greek word for play-acting. The hypocrite is, in truth, to all intents and purposes, an actor; and the illustration is so luminous, that we have adopted also another figure, derived from the Roman stage, and talk of the mask of hypocrisy. Nor can there be any thing more closely resembling a real mask, than the serious and earnest countenance with which a practised hypocrite tells an untruth. Let not the reader, however, imagine, on the strength of this etymology, that the practice of hypocrisy took its rise in the theatre; on the contrary, there is the best reason for believing that hypocrisy is the elder sister; and that the race of the Mawworms can boast a much greater antiquity than that of the Listons.

How extremely necessary this part of the human mechanism is to the success of lying, it is almost superfluous to detail. Amidst the endless variety of bad stage-players, it is difficult to find a single bad liar; so essential does every man feel it to tell his lie naturally. So important is this external semblance of an affection, that whole classes of mankind trust to its exhibition, without thinking it necessary to back the effect by a formula of spoken words. What need has the shopman behind his counter, to aver de vive voix that he is indeed his customer's "most obedient and very humble servant," when a cringing and fawning exterior will equally throw the purchaser off his guard, and predispose him to take the goods at the vendor's own valuation. In

matters of love it is well known, that a single glance dexterously shot at the proper moment, is as good as the most long-winded declaration of passion; and so convincing is a well-affected air of tenderness, that it will overpower, not only all the warnings of friends concerning its falsehood, but the longest personal experience of treachery and coldness. In this sense, the poet's thought is absolute truth;—

Look in her face and you forget them all.

In like manner, a grave and composed countenance in the pulpit, an intense expression of piety and devotion, seizes the imagination of the congregation, before the preacher can open his text; and provided he throws a certain unction into the delivery of his discourse, it matters little that his life is a standing contradiction to all he says.

If other proof were wanting how far lying enters into the essence of all social arrangements, how very nearly falsehood is the rule, and truth the exception in civil life, we need not look further than to the universal prevalence of class hypocrisy; which is so intense, that a man of any experience, as he walks the street, may tell the profession of the passers by, through the sort of lie which is impressed on their carriage and bearing.

But above all other fraudulent givings forth, there is none more general or more striking than that undefinable exterior complex, which is understood by the word respectability.

In this instance, it is not precisely the fine feathers that make the fine birds in it the aliquid plus quam sutis est in external appearance, on the contrary, is known at once as flash, and is eminently suspicious. A superfluity of "rings, and things, and fine array,' is more likely to put the beholder on his guard, than to excite a desirable confidence in the bearer. Yet the contrary of wrong is in this respect far from right; for nothing wars with respectability like a hole in one's stocking. After all, the respectability which lies in dress alone, is not the perfection of hypocrisy, and is indeed fit only to impose on such simpletons as police magistrates, whose talk is of respectable felons, and of street-walkers of respectable appearance. The thorough air of respectability is only to be acquired by long practice, consisting in a harmony of exterior, a propriety of voice, gesture, manner, in a je ne sçais quoi in the whole outward man, bespeaking decent associations quas nequeo monstrare et sentio tantum. To attain to this, is out of the power of the rabble of rogues, the mob of low-bred impostors; and therein consists its great value as an instrument of deception. All its associations are subservient to the fraud, and every thing about it tends directly to create in the beholder a movement of credulity. Look at that highly respectable gentleman with a slight dash of sanctity also thrown over his surface, could you believe that such a man is a wholesale dealer in perjury, bribery, and intimidation? Look again at that respectable merchant, a model of precision, if every thing about his outward man could be taken as proof of that quality; who would imagine that he was "a rogue in spirit, or a rogue in grain ;" that he has made a fortune by robbing the Exchequer, Hal," or is on the eve of his third fraudulent bankruptcy?

Then again there are respectable housekeepers in debt to the whole

neighbourhood, respectable tradesmen subsisting on kites, and "enormous sacrifices;" and respectable attorneys, whose interference is certain ruin. In short, there is no falsehood male or female, of which respectability is not the daily and hourly cover; insomuch that the really respectable are heartily ashamed of the association, and eagerly strive after an exterior that signifies nothing.

We should not then be far out in our calculations, were we to lay it down as a rule mathematically correct, that the morality of a nation is inversely as its boastings of respectability; and that no man should be trusted, who thrusts his respectability under your nose.

From these lofty and transcendental views of our subject, it is painful to come down to the petty details of every-day life; yet without a glance at them, it would be impossible to convey an accurate notion of the importance of falsehood in the conduct of society. From the first così al egro deception, by which the child is duped into taking physic, to the last formal exercise for a doctor's degree, the entire education of the social man is a practical lesson in falsehood. Concealment, cheatery, and make-believe surround him on every side, and when example does not seduce, severity too often forces upon him the lessons of evasion. If hypocrisy be not taught in the nursery, it assuredly is acquired in the school-room; and certain lies are not only permitted, but enjoined by the whole authority of the schoolboy code of honour, in the intercourse between scholars and their teachers. Then come the collegiate swearing to observe statutes cum commento, and the subscription to the Articles, in defiance of all internal convictions. Then, there is the practical falsehood involved in eating your way through the Temple or Lincoln's Inn-a fit preliminary for that monstrous heap of lies included under the head of fictions of law. Alongside with these is the lie of virtual representation, and that of the co-extension of representation and taxability: or what think you, reader, of the nolo episcopari, or the direct inspiration of a congé d'élire?

Another evidence of the utility of falsehood opens upon us, when we consider our natural susceptibility to the charms of eloquence. Often as the fact has been stated, the world has yet to learn, that he who lets fly at you a long speech, charged with an infinity of tropes and figures, and full of inflammatory appeals to the passions, has and can have no other purpose in hand but deception. Plain, honest truth, requires no flowers of speech;" and there is no such dexterous way of slipping a palpable lie, as presenting it under cover of a metaphor. On this account, the world at large justly prefers a dull and stupid sermon, to an elaborate and ostentatious parade of pulpit eloquence: and this not so much as implying that the preacher thinks more of himself than of the cause he is advocating (which if not a positive falsehood is a quasi lie), but because it is a palpable misapplication of the art, a painting of the lily, a gilding of the refined gold of gospel truth.

It was an invincible conviction with Jeremy Bentham that the whole law of evidence which so eminently distinguishes the jurisprudence of our beloved country, is directed to impede the discovery of truth; and more especially that part of it which relates to the administration of oaths; and certain it is, that though an honest man may be believed on his simple affirmation, nothing under the solemnity of evoking God's

name will suffice to give credence to the statements of an unprincipled vagabond. Such a man, therefore, might waste a deal of good breath in the dissemination of falsehood to no purpose, if his credibility were not supported by so imposing a ceremony.

This view of the case is confirmed by many other rules of evidence familiar with the reader, but to which we have not room to do justice, in the present paper; but what most clearly exhibits the intended purpose of these delicate investigations of my good lords the judges, and that which more especially belongs to this part of our argument, is the authorizing two professed sophists to speak to evidence. It is not sufficient for the suppression of truth that they shall have exercised all their personal ingenuity in browbeating and terrifying a witness, in shaping their questions so as to mislead him into the sort of answer they desire to receive, in drawing him off from the point to which he was about to come, and coaxing him into an admission, whose import he cannot understand: but when all this is done, they are authorized to fall open-mouthed on the whole, to dissect and to put together, to observe the bearings, and to misrepresent the import of what has been said, to undermine the character of the witness, to fritter away the weight of his evidence, and so to mystify the twelve good men and true, that they are no longer capable of distinguishing right from wrong, or truth from falsehood.

Closely connected with eloquence is poetry, an art expressly devoted to the service of falsehood: and in saying this, we allude not to the commonplace of its dealing in fictitious subjects; but refer rather to the innate falsity of its natural direction. Neither is it merely that all its means are at war with truth, that it is built upon exaggeration, and that it aims at something that transcends the flat realities of everyday life: it promotes the ends of falsehood far more efficiently by the ambiguity it confers on prose language, by the mass of fallacious metaphysics it palms on society, and by the habitual subordination of reason to imagination which it is its express object to impose on the human animal. Poets are the great professional supporters of every profitable humbug which it is the interest of masses to maintain. The poets of antiquity were the great upholders, the main pillars of idolatry; and when we consider that they are the high-priests of Cupid, and the hierophants of Bellona, it is impossible to place their mischievous mendacity in a stronger light.

But do we mean by this statement, to decry and discredit poetry? far from it: on the contrary, we firmly believe that to their mendacity the poets owe their utility, not only in the narrowest sense of the word, but in its most extended signification; and that the power they hold over the fancy, and the whole pleasure they are enabled to bestow upon their species, is the immediate consequence of their falsehood.

It is not, then, in the business of the world alone, that falsehood produces such striking effects; the far greater part of the delights of life are dependant on the same cause.

Should death, the one great truth of existence, be constantly before our eyes, life would be utterly intolerable. Indeed, the quantum est in rebus inane would alone be sufficient to imbitter happiness, and to render suicide epidemic, if it were not for the multitude of false views that we steadfastly take of human nature. What is more common

than to hear those who are ever so little advanced in life, bitterly lamenting the deplorable truths that press upon them, and sighing loudly and heavily, because the age of illusions is past. Life itself, they tell you, is a lie, a cheat; and they affirm it is enough for a sensible man to see things as they are, to render him thoroughly disgusted with the world and

himself.

Nay, some there are who believe that nature itself is one mighty falsehood; that not even the senses are to be trusted, and that the idea of an external world (an idea which we cannot shake off, if we would), is altogether false and unfounded. Thus much we must admit, that the teachings of nature are not always to be depended upon; and that the blessed sun itself (of which the poet has said,

Solem quis dicere falsum
Audeat)

is no better than an impostor, with its risings in the east, and settings in the west, so calculated to deceive mankind in the whole field of astronomy-a deception which it required centuries of observation and the greatest acuteness of the human intellect to remove. After this, it would be mere bathos to insist upon such deceptive phenomena as the mirage, the calenture, double suns and moons, and armies fighting in the air, which have thrown whole nations into confusion : but is not the innate tendency of man to animate the tree, the grove, and the fountain, and to attribute every movement he beholds to a series of petty local deities, a suggestio falsi on the part of that old woman, dame Nature?

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An exclusive admiration of truth, and a narrow-minded addiction to its practice, must then be admitted to result from a one-sided view of the subject. We cannot, indeed, go the whole length of the author, from whom we have taken our last motto, who affirms that falsehood is the principle of all society; for though it may be absolutely certain that if every man were to speak without reserve what he thinks of himself and of others, there would be an end of every thing; that if every evil wish, every evil act, were displayed in all its nakedness, the species could never resist the universal confession, but every man would retreat to his own separate den and at most tolerate his wife;" still, truth, in some portion has its utility and cannot be dispensed with. We believe this quotation to be one of Soulié's rhetorical exaggerations; for if truth were indeed thus poisonous, it would have shown its lethality, long ago. The fact is, very few indeed are really deceived as to the good intentions of their neighbours, only they do not like being put to the trouble of resentment, by acknowledging the truth. Be this, however, as it may, it is consolatory to know, that intolerable as the naked truth in all its undiluted intensity might prove, there is not much chance of our being ever subjected to the necessity of bearing it. Truth and falsehood must continue to jog on together like light and shade; and each will be so tempered by the other, to the end of time, as to let man live through his generation quietly enough, and find his account in the natural balance of the two. What more can be desired?

fl.