is the peculiar device of a _conscientious_
detractor.

10. Reverence is an ennobling sentiment; it is felt to be degrading
only by the vulgar mind, which would escape the sense of its own
littleness by elevating itself into an antagonist of what is above it.
He that has no pleasure in looking up is not fit so much as to look
down. Of such minds are mannerists in Art; in the world, tyrants of
all sorts.

11. No right judgment can ever be formed on any subject having a moral
or intellectual bearing without benevolence; for so strong is man's
natural self-bias, that, without this restraining principle, he
insensibly becomes a competitor in all such cases presented to his
mind; and, when the comparison is thus made personal, unless the odds
be immeasurably against him, his decision will rarely be impartial.
In other words, no one can see any thing as it really is through the
misty spectacles of self-love. We must wish well to another in order
to do him justice. Now the virtue in this good-will is not to blind us
to his faults, but to our own rival and interposing merits.

12. In the same degree that we overrate ourselves, we shall underrate
others; for injustice allowed at home is not likely to be corrected
abroad. Never, therefore, expect justice from a vain man; if he has
the negative magnanimity not to disparage you, it is the most you can
expect.

13. The Phrenologists are right in placing the organ of self-love in
the back of the head, it being there where a vain man carries his
intellectual light; the consequence of which is, that every man he
approaches is obscured by his own shadow.

14. Nothing is rarer than a solitary lie; for lies breed like Surinam
toads; you cannot tell one but out it comes with a hundred young ones
on its back.

15. If the whole world should agree to speak nothing but truth, what
an abridgment it would make of speech! And what an unravelling there
would be of the invisible webs which men, like so many spiders, now
weave about each other! But the contest between Truth and Falsehood
is now pretty well balanced. Were it not so, and had the latter the
mastery, even language would soon become extinct, from its very
uselessness. The present superfluity of words is the result of the
warfare.

16. A witch's skiff cannot more easily sail in the teeth of the wind,
than the human _eye_ lie against fact; but the truth will oftener
quiver through lips with a lie upon them.

17. An open brow w