cross-lights, and glaring reflections may be caught by
the images we flash upon them from the mirrors of admiration we swing in
our hands. But they who have laid down all the shows of things with
their own superficial countenances and mortal frames cannot be imposed
upon by the faces of adulation we make up. They who listen to that other
speech, whose tones are the literally translated truth, cannot be
patient with the gloss and varnish of our, at best, imperfect language.
Let their awful presences shame and transfigure, terrify and transport
us, into reality of communication akin to their own! "I will express
myself in music to you," said a great composer to a bereft woman, as he
took his seat at the piano. He felt that he could not manifest otherwise
the feeling in him that was so deep. By sound or by silence, let it be
only the conviction of our heart we venture to offer to spirits before
whom the meaning of all things is unveiled!

But _private conversation_ is the great sphere of sympathetic lying. Our
antipathies doubtless often tempt to falsify. We stretch the truth,
trying, in private quarrels, to make out our case, or holding up our end
in party-controversies. Anger, malice, envy, and revenge make us often
break the ninth commandment. But concession, compromise, yielding to
others' influence, and indisposition to contradict those whom we love or
the world respects, generate more deceit than comes from all the evil
passions, which, as Sterne said of lust, are too serious to be
successful in cunning play. How it would mortify most persons to have
brought back to them at night exact accounts of the divers opinions they
have expressed to different persons, with facile conformity to the mood
of each one during the course of a single day! How the members of any
pleasant evening-company might astonish or amuse each other by narrating
together the contradictory views the same voluble discourser has
unfolded to them successively during the passage of one hour! so easily
we bend and conform, and deny God and ourselves, to gratify the guest we
converse with. On account of a few variations, scholars have composed
what they call Harmonies of the Gospels; but how much harder it would be
for any one of us to harmonize his talk on any subject moving the minds
of men! Where strong self-interest acts, we can explain changes and
inconsistencies in the great organs set up to operate on public
sentiment. Such a paper as the London "