them quite obsolete; that it must come a little nearer
the true aim again, or it cannot continue in this world. The "Champion
of England" eased in iron or tin, and "able to mount his horse with
little assistance,"--this Champion and the thousand-fold cousinry of
Phantasms he has, nearly all dead now but still walking as ghosts,
must positively take himself away: who can endure him, and his solemn
trumpetings and obsolete gesticulations, in a Time that is full of
deadly realities, coming open-mouthed upon us? At Drury Lane, let him
play his part, him and his thousand-fold cousinry; and welcome, so long
as any public will pay a shilling to see him: but on the solid earth,
under the extremely earnest stars, we dare not palter with him, or
accept his tomfooleries any more. Ridiculous they seem to some; horrible
they seem to me: all lies, if one look whence they come and whither they
go, are horrible.

Alas, it will be found, I doubt, that in England more than in any
country, our Public Life and our Private, our State and our Religion,
and all that we do and speak (and the most even of what we _think_),
is a tissue of half-truths and whole-lies; of hypocrisies,
conventionalisms, worn-out traditionary rags and cobwebs; such a
life-garment of beggarly incredible and uncredited falsities as no
honest souls of Adam's Posterity were ever enveloped in before. And we
walk about in it with a stately gesture, as if it were some priestly
stole or imperial mantle; not the foulest beggar's gabardine that ever
was. "No Englishman dare believe the truth," says one: "he stands, for
these two hundred years, enveloped in lies of every kind; from nadir to
zenith an ocean of traditionary cant surrounds him as his life-element.
He really thinks the truth dangerous. Poor wretch, you see him
everywhere endeavoring to temper the truth by taking the falsity
along with it, and welding them together; this he calls 'safe course,'
'moderate course,' and other fine names; there, balanced between God and
the Devil, he thinks he _can_ serve two masters, and that things will go
well with him."

In the cotton-spinning and similar departments our English friend
knows well that truth or God will have nothing to do with the Devil or
falsehood, but will ravel all the web to pieces if you introduce
the Devil or Non-veracity in any form into it: in this department,
therefore, our English friend avoids falsehood. But in the religious,
political, social, moral,