shame, when men find that no iniquity can | the balance between Whig and Tory nicely lose them the applause of their own party, true. Ten years afterwards, on revising and no innocence secure them against the the work, he thus confesses his delusion to calumnies of the opposite.' Those who a friend. As I began the History with have been foremost in the aspersion of a these two reigns [James I. and Charles I.] political adversary while he is living, often I now find that they, above all the rest, acknowledge the injustice of it by their have been corrupted with Whig rancour, eulogies when he is dead. Bolingbroke, and that I really deserved the name of a who had been one of the principal detract- party writer, and boasted without any ors of the famous Duke of Marlborough, foundation of my impartiality; but if you was called upon in a private company to now do me the honour to give this part of confirm some anecdotes of his parsimony: my work a second perusal, I am persuaded He was so great a man,' he replied, that that you will no longer throw on me this I have forgotten his vices.' The answer reproachful epithet, and will acquit me of has been much commended, and it is un- all propensity to Whiggism.' Whether doubtedly better to be just late than even in the second instance he had attained never, but we agree with Archbishop to the vaunted judicial equanimity is someWhately, that the tardy reparation in these what doubtful. He had been irritated by cases is less deserving of applause than the outcry which was raised against him the previous calumnies of reproach. The for presuming,' as he said, to shed a detractions were addressed to a sentient generous tear for the fate of Charles I. and being, and whether they effect their purpose the Earl of Strafford;' and the abuse had or not, were designed to wound or discredit some share in producing a re-action against him, but the laudatory recantation is the party which had chiefly attacked him. spoken over ashes and cannot soothe the So subtle are the workings of personal dull, cold ear of death.' feeling, and so incessantly do we need to stand upon our guard against it. readers of books are upon their trial as well as the writers. An impartial history would be pronounced partial by those who are partial themselves.

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Archbishop Whately dwells on the necessity of allowing the question, What is the truth?' to anticipate every other consideration. If it is only asked in the second place, the mind, he justly urges, will have been drawn by a law as sure as that of gravitation towards the belief to which it is predisposed, and will employ its ingenuity in discovering arguments for a conclusion which it has adopted independently of them. Rely upon it,' it was said of a dexterous and not over-scrupulous person in power, he will never take any step that is bad without having a very good reason to give for it.' The Archbishop adds the comment, that we are ready enough to be warned against the sophistry of another, but need no less to be warned against our own. The confidence which a barrister will sometimes have in the cause of his client when it is palpable to every unbiassed mind that it is utterly bad, is a wonderful example of the belief into which men can reason themselves by ingenious fallacies. A false conviction once introduced, and assumed as an axiom, is an erroneous element which must vitiate all the after processes of the understanding. The most bigoted writers constantly make the most emphatic protestations of their impartiality, because the points in which they are prejudiced have attained in their apprehensions to the rank of indisputable truths. Hume repeatedly boasted that his History of the Stuarts was free from all bias, and that he had kept

The

In former times there were historians who avowedly wrote as they were bribed. Paulus Jovius was said to keep a bank of lies. To those who gave handsomely he assigned illustrious ancestors and praiseworthy deeds, and those who gave nothing he traduced. He told the Cardinal of Lorraine that unless his pension was paid he would assert that his Eminence did not belong to the great Lorraine line of Godefroi, and when there was a suspension of his works, he boldly declared it was because no man had hired him. Once being warned that his representations were extravagant, he replied that it was immaterial, since the next generation would receive them for facts. He maintained that it was the privilege of the historian to aggravate and extenuate faults, and to elevate or depreciate virtues; to dress the liberal paymaster in rich brocade, and the austere niggard in coarse cloth. There have been many later historians who would have flung the fees of Jovius in the faces of the donors, and who have not the less copied his practices, correcting the features, and heightening the colours in the portraits of some, and smearing the faces of others, as the Duchess of Marlborough, in a fit of rage, did the picture of her daughter, exclaiming that she was now as black without as with

in. Upon the party-spirit which often to truth, for amusing exaggerations are to dictates these misrepresentations we have such an extent the favourite staple of contouched already, but there is another cause versation that Montesquieu having once which is equally powerful,-the desire to had the curiosity to count how often an be brilliant. Historic truth is usually too incident was repeated, which, to his sounder complex, too full of half-lights and faint judgment, was not worth telling at all, shadows to admit of startling contrasts. found in the three weeks, during which it The world is not peopled with angels and was current in the fashionable world, that demons but with men. Thus, when the it was related in his presence two hundred first consideration is to produce an effect, and twenty-five times. The immense maaccuracy is inevitably sacrificed; and in- jority of pungent anecdotes have received stead of attempting to give a faithful repre- their point in the manufactory of the wit. sentation of the object, the author considers The man who aims at the frivolous repuhow he can make it look well in his pic- tation of being always provided with a ture. From the same motive the historian stock of ludicrous tales would soon become may adopt the incidents which are most a bankrupt if he had not recourse to forromantic, regardless of their intrinsic im- gery to maintain the supply. He is always probability, or undoubted falsity. This on the look-out for circumstances which he failing is common in Hume. Some sin can mould to his purpose, distorts them through the passion for an antithetical without compunction, and thinks it a far style, than which none is so dazzling, or finer thing to be sprightly than to be veralends itself less readily when used in ex- cious. Horace Walpole was great in this cess, to the exact expression of circum- line. I am so put to it for something to stances. Events do not any more than the say,' he writes on one occasion, that I characters of the actors in them present a would make a memorandum of the most continuous series of pointed contrasts, and improbable lie that could be invented by a to sustain the artifice the incidents must be viscountess-dowager, as the old Duchess of softened in one half of the antithesis or ex- Rutland does when she is told of some aggerated in the other. The facts in short strange casualty,-" Lucy, child, step into must be fitted to the sentence instead of the next room and set that down." "Mathe sentence to the facts. Such persons dam," says Lady Lucy, "it can't be are not of the opinion of St. Jerome that true!" Oh, no matter, child; it will do truth told inelegantly is better than elo- for news into the country next post." quent falsehood. They all come under Sarcastically as this is related, it falls short Bacon's censure, and the chief difference of the practice of Walpole himself. He between them and Paulus Jovius is that had the ambition to keep up a continuous they do for literary popularity what he succession of lively letters, and he not did for money. only set down improbable lies,' but was The newsmongers are described by certainly guilty of embroidering his intelTheophrastus as people who lied for ly-ligence, though he may not have absoluteing's sake. He could not conceive what benefit they derived from the practice, especially as the clothes of some of them were stolen at the baths while they were declaiming their fables to wondering auditors. The benefit was clearly the pleasure of being listened to by an eager crowd, and afforded abundant inducement in a city, where the inhabitants spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing.' The daily papers have nearly destroyed the trade of the fabricator of public intelligence. His fictions are refuted by not appearing there, without the necessity for contradiction; and to amuse the credulous with success, he must mostly keep to the domain of private affairs. But there is another class of gossips-the tellers of good stories' who continue to obtain a ready and undeserved confidence. Narrator and listener in these cases are alike prone to prefer falsehood

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ly fabricated it. His very story in ridicule of the inventions of dowager ladies is probably in part an instance of his own. Biography has been incurably adulterated by manufactured tales. Lord Orrery related, as an unquestionable occurrence, that Swift once commenced the service when nobody, except the clerk, attended his church, with Dearly beloved Roger, the Scripture moveth you and me in sundry places.' The trait was long believed, but Mr. Theophilus Swift afterwards discovered the anecdote in a jest-book which was published before his great kinsman was born, and the Dean, whose boast it was I that he had never been known to steal a hint,' was not the man to borrow a jocosity as paltry as it was profane. A host of stories, centuries old, have in the same manner been re-told of the celebrities of each succeeding generation, and were probably no more true of the first person to

1

national vanity has its root. When the tion. Archbishop Whately regrets that Canadian, from the banks of the Huron, is the term dissimulation' should have been asked, in Voltaire's tale, L'Ingénu,' which extended to include 'simulation,' and that language he thought the best, the Huron, the second of these words should have the English, or the French, he answers, fallen into desuetude. Lord Chesterfield the Huron beyond all dispute. A lady, a in the middle of the eighteenth century, native of Lower Brittany, is astonished at and Hume in 1764, in his private corre the reply, for she had always imagined spondence, employed both expressions in that, next to the Low-Breton, there was no their proper sense, as if they were then in language to be compared with the French. familiar use. Yet Steele, in a paper in the The rest of the company begin to talk up-Tatler' in 1710, supposes his readers to on the multiplicity of tongues, and they agree that but for the tower of Babel French alone would have been spoken throughout the world. This is a pleasant satire upon the general disposition of every people to believe itself unrivalled, notwithstanding that, as all cannot be the first, each nation might learn to mistrust a conclusion which is shared by the rest. Lord Chesterfield maintained that such prejudices had their use, and mentions, as an instance, that the popular delusion of one Englishman being able to beat three Frenchmen had often enabled him to beat two. He overlooked the greater mischief which prejudices produced-the contests which have arisen between countries out of the overweening notion they entertained of their prowess, and which, perhaps, created the occasion for beating Frenchmen at all; the evil to the individual of this arrogance and conceit; the bar which vanity puts to improvement. What is false in itself can never be politic. Prejudices are regarded with more lenity than they deserve; for to prejudge a question at least shows a carelessness about truth, though it may not imply the same depravity of nature as a wilful departure from it. One caution is yet required. In the attempt to rise superior to a common prejudice it is possible to become prejudiced in the opposite direction. Dryden affirms of some of the judges of his day that, right or wrong, they always decided for the poor against the rich; and he quotes a saying of Charles II., that the crown was uniformly worsted in every case which was heard before Sir Matthew Hale, from his over-jealousy of falling into the more usual error of favouring the sovereign to the injury of the subject.

Bacon might have embodied in his Essay on Truth' the principal part of his observations on Simulation and Dissimulation.' The difference between these and falsehood, according to South, is that the last applies to deception by words, the former to deception by actions, gestures or behaviour. Neither Bacon, nor writers in general, have kept strictly to the distinc

be ignorant of their meaning, and says 'it will be necessary to observe that the learned call simulation a pretence of what is not, and dissimulation a concealment of what is.' It is simulation which Fielding describes when he relates the conduct of Mrs. Blifil in feigning grief on the death of a husband whom she hated, and of whom she was glad to be rid. She continued a whole month with all the decorations of sickness,-visited by physicians, attended by nurses, and receiving constant messages from her acquaintance to inquire after her health. At length the decent time for sickness, and immoderate grief having expired, the doctors were discharged and the lady began to see company; being altered only from what she was before, by that colour of sadness in which she had dressed her person and countenance.' It was 'dissimulation when Black George, after picking up the pocketbook containing the 500. note, assisted Tom Jones to search every tuft of grass in the meadow where it was dropped, and exerted as much diligence in quest of the lost goods as if he had hoped to find them.' It was both simulation and dissimulation when Sophia Western, to conceal from her aunt her passion for Tom Jones, treated him with a studied neglect, and paid a marked attention to Blifil whom she abhorred. She dissembled the regard she felt for the one, and simulated for the other a partiality she did not entertain.. When the action is not, as in this case, directly double, each of these vices still carries with it, as a consequence, some tincture of its fellow. Mrs. Blifil in pretending sorrow dissembled her satisfaction, and Black George, in affecting ignorance of what had become of the pocket-book, might be said to be simulating innocence. But the acts are named according as the predominant design is to pretend to that which is not, or to masque that which is, and either may be practised without the other being present to the thoughts. The greatest imperfection of language is that the same term is used for dissimilar ideas, and where a rigorous phraseology has once been esta

blished, corresponding to the differences one is ever habitually guided by in practice. existing in things, it is a step backwards An honest man is always before it, and a towards barbarism to blend separate no- knave is generally behind it.' This is adtions under a common appellation, The mirably said. evil requires to be constantly checked, because precision of thought being rare, there is a perpetual tendency to confound ideas which are closely allied, and, as a consequence, to convert the words which distinguish them into synonyms, or else to allow the neighbouring expression to drop out of use. It is on this account that it has seemed to us worth while to illustrate a distinction which was formerly observed, and which, by the latitude given to the term dissimulation,' is now frequently overlooked.