ation of Martin Chuzzlewit ten
years before). Hall was a genuine comedy figure. Such oily and voluble
sanctimoniousness needed no modification to be fitted to appear before
the footlights in satirical drama. He might be called an ingenuous
hypocrite, an artless humbug, a veracious liar, so obviously were
the traits indicated innate and organic in him rather than acquired.
Dickens, after all, missed some of the finer shades of the character;
there can be little doubt that Hall was in his own private contemplation
as shining an object of moral perfection as he portrayed himself before
others. His perversity was of the spirit, not of the letter, and thus
escaped his own recognition. His indecency and falsehood were in his
soul, but not in his consciousness; so that he paraded them at the very
moment that he was claiming for himself all that was their opposite.
No one who knew him took him seriously, but admired the ability of his
performance, and so well was he understood that he did little or no
harm beyond the venting of a spite here and there and the boring of his
auditors after the absurdity of him became tedious. Self-worshippers
of the _os-rotundus_ sort are seldom otherwise mischievous. He may be
sufficiently illustrated by two anecdotes.

They both occurred at a dinner where I was a guest, and Bennoch sat at
the head of the table. Hall sat at Bennoch's left hand, and my place was
next to Hall's. The old gentleman--he was at this period panoplied
in the dignity of a full suit of snow-white hair, and that unctuous
solemnity and simpering self-complacency of visage and demeanor which
were inflamed rather than abated by years--began the evening by telling
in sesquipedalian language a long tale of an alleged adventure of his
with my father, which, inasmuch as there was no point to it, need not
be rehearsed here; but I noticed that Bennoch was for some reason hugely
diverted by it, and found difficulty in keeping his hilarity within due
bounds of decorum, Hall's tone being all the while of the most earnest
gravity. Later I took occasion to ask Bennoch the secret of his mirth;
was the tale a fiction? "Not a bit of it," Bennoch replied; "it's every
word of it true; but what tickled me was that it was myself and not Hall
who was in the adventure with your father; but Hall has been telling it
this way for twenty years past, and has long since come to believe that
his lie is the truth." So ended the first lesson.

The second