SHEER FABRICATION. 575 was generally believed, and his statements, which were given with the full appearance of relating a real occurrence, had once or twice led to awkward results. The small boy was thus early qualified, one might infer, to be admitted into the Lawnmarket Club, celebrated in traditions of Edinburgh, the members of which used, when there was no post from London, to invent imaginary news, and circulate it with all pains in the absence of real; whence came the title of Lawnmarket Gazettes, to designate articles of intelligence which had no foundation in fact. Newspaper canards are a long-established institution. But sometimes the reporter's invention is exercised in ways least to be suspected. Sir Samuel Romilly, in 1817, took note, in his Diary, of the perpetual and extraordinary misrepresentations in the journals, of the proceedings in Chancery,—the Morning Chronicle, for instance, reporting Sir Samuel and others as extravagantly praising the Chancellor, and the Chancellor himself as expressing his painful anxiety to master each case, etc.,-pure fictions altogether, it seems; for, not only the expressions contained in the newspapers were never used, but nothing passed which afforded a pretext for pretending that they had been used: "The substance as well as the language, the panegyrics, and the apology, are all pure invention." Nearly thirty years earlier, Romilly had been struck by Mirabeau's cool fabrication, in the columns of the Courrier de Provence, of a speech he alleged to have been just delivered by Mounier in the National Assembly, and of a happy retort then and there made by the writer. "Of all this not a single word was uttered in the Assembly." Neither Mounier nor any other person made any such speech; neither Mirabeau nor any other person made any such reply. A year or two previously, Mirabeau had written to Romilly a minutely 576 INVETERATE LIARS. detailed account of a dispute which he supposed himself to have had with Gibbon, the historian, at Lord Lansdowne's table, and in which he expressed himself with so much violence, that he now felt he was to blame. Now, Mirabeau "certainly never had any such dispute with Gibbon ;" and at the time spoken of, Gibbon was actually residing at Lausanne. Evidently it was not with Mirabeau, as with Mademoiselle de Scudéry, a canon of faith and practice, that "il n'est jamais permis à un homme sage d'inventer des choses qu'on ne puisse croire. Le véritable art du mensonge est de bien ressembler à la vérité." Folks, according to Mat Prior, prone to leasing, "Say things at first because they're pleasing, Nor care to have their lie deserted, Till their own dreams at length deceive them, Lying may be fostered into a passion, a ruling passion; and it is a ruling passion that has even been known, like others, to be strong in death. Hazlitt has a story of a man so notorious for a propensity to lying (not out of spite or cunning, but as a gratuitous exercise of invention), that from a child no one could ever believe a syllable he uttered; and the last act of his life did not disgrace his renown. For having gone abroad, and falling into a dangerous decline, he was advised to return home; and so, after paying all that he was worth for his passage, he went on shipboard, and employed the few remaining days he had to live in making and executing his will; in which he bequeathed large estates in different parts of England, money in the funds, rich jewels, rings, and all kinds of valuables, to his old friends and acquaintance, who, not knowing how far the force of nature could go, were not for some time EVIL COMMUNICATIONS. 577 convinced that all this fairy wealth had never an existence anywhere but in the idle coinage of his brain whose whims and projects were no more. The extreme keeping in this character Hazlitt can only account for by supposing such an original constitutional levity as made truth entirely indifferent to the man, and the serious importance attached to it by others an object of perpetual sport and ridicule. BY LII. EVIL COMMUNICATIONS. I CORINTHIANS xv. 33. Y some to Menander, by others to Euripides, is referred the metrical quotation which St. Paul apparently uses as proverbial: Φθείρουσιν ἤθη χρηστὰ ὁμιλίαι κακαί. The same apostle who warns the Corinthians that corrupt communications have notoriously, proverbially, a corrupting influence upon sound morals, exhorts the Ephesians to let no corrupt communication (λóyos σаπρòs) proceed out of their mouth. Corruption is contagious. To communicate is to impart. The communicant cannot long remain incorrupt. The plague soon spreads, and the plague-spot soon tells. Have fellowship with the lame, and you will learn to limp, says a Latin adage: Claudicantis conversatione utens, ipse quoque claudicare disces. It is a catching complaint: Menander is fathered with the saw, κακοῖς ὁμιλῶν, κ' αὐτὸς ἐκβήση Kakós, which is all but identical with St. Paul's quotation, in spirit, though not in words. Associate with the wicked, it says, and you will become wicked yourself. PP 578 EVIL COMMUNICATIONS Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned? Can one go upon hot coals, and his feet not be burned? Both these are "burning questions' put by the Wise King. Sir Thomas Browne, in his Christian Morals, addressing himself, after the manner of Marcus Antoninus in his Meditations, is special in the enjoinder, "Be critical in thy consortion. Look not for roses in Attalus's garden [of poisons], or wholesome flowers in a venomous plantation. And since there is scarce any one bad, but some others are the worse for him, tempt not contagion by proximity, and hazard not thyself in the shadow of corruption." Certainly, says another of our old writers, if there be any Dalilah under heaven, it is to be found in bad society; for that will bind us, blind us, betray us, undo us. "When the Achates of thy life shall be ill, will not thy life be so too?" One rotten apple will infect the store; the putrid grape corrupts the whole cluster. "Nous voyons le vice, et le vice germe au fond de notre cœur." "Peu à peu, à votre insu, vous êtes transformés à son image, et sa corruption s'est infiltrée dans vos âmes." Know, says Epictetus in his Enchiridion, that if your companion be dissolute, his corruption will also reach you at length, although your mind was altogether pure and honest before. Leigh Hunt's Sir Ralph Esher has to utter a lament over an instance of the kind: "Yes: so dangerous is an ill companion to the best and cleverest persons, during youth, that what I had hardly dared to think of as a remote possibility, had turned out to be too true:" the mischief was done. Αἰσχροῖς γὰρ αἰσχρὰ πράγματ ̓ ἐκδιδάσκεται, as Electra has it in Sophocles. Men love not to be found singular, observes Robert South,—especially where the singularity lies in the rugged and severe paths of CORRUPT GOOD MANNERS. 579 virtue: company causes confidence, and gives both credit and defence, credit to the crime, and defence to the criminal. Just as the fearfullest and the basest creatures, got into flocks and herds, become bold and daring, so "the modestest natures, hardened by the fellowship and concurrence of others in the same vicious course, grow into another frame of spirit; and in a short time. lose all apprehension of the indecency and foulness of that which they have so familiarly and so long conversed with." To yield to the influence of the things and people around you, is to drift with the moral current. The first day, as Colani traces such a decline and fall, you shudder with horror. The second, you are impressed by the force of numbers on the opposite side, and begin to be half-ashamed of your isolation. The third, you incline to charge yourself with prejudices and prudery. In brief, by the end of a month, or the end of six months perhaps, descending by insensible degrees this smooth decline, you come to be of one mind with "good society," and have lost the courage to break with it. "En vertu de la loi de la solidarité on est impliqué dans la corruption commune." Every man, says Feltham, will naturally endeavour to communicate to others that quality which may be predominant in himself: "we can converse with nothing but will work upon us, and by the unperceived stealth of time, liken us to itself." Hence the stress the old moralist lays upon the choice of the company we keep, as one of the most weighty actions of our lives. "Do you see," said Dr. Arnold to an assistant-master who had recently come to Rugby, "those two boys walking together? I never saw them together before; you should make an especial point of observing the company they keep ;-nothing so tells the changes in a boy's character." It is an apophthegm of Rousseau's," Rien ne montre mieux les vrais penchants |