through thick and thin, and even came to believe in it himself.

In one of his strenuous onsets against the home policy of our government during the outbreak of the French Revolution, Coleridge, himself at that time a party pamphleteer, declares the panic of property to have been struck in the first instance for party purposes, and goes on to say that "when it became general, its propagators caught it themselves, and ended in believing their own lie; even as the bulls of Borodaile are said sometimes to run mad with the echo of their own bellowing."

Again, in one of those manuscript notes and marginalia with which S. T. C. enriched his copy, greatly prized, of Southey's "Life of Wesley," the Moravian leader's advice to the Methodist leader, when asked what could he preach, namely, "Preach faith till you have it; and then, because you have it, you will preach faith,”—is saddled by our annotator with the query: "Is not this too like, Tell a lie long enough and often enough, and you will be sure to end in believing it?"

How much old men (at least of the Shallow sort) are given to lying, is a Shakespearean commonplace. Centenarians of the Parr and Jenkins figure have recently been subjected, by the sceptical, to the general charge of more or less mild white, or sub-conscious mendacity. It might be supposed, observes one of Sir G. C. Lewis's critical school, that an educated man should know his own age, were it not that the process by which a fiction gradually

imposes upon its author is only too familiar to every one who likes to tell a story. To believe your own lies is the first step in the art of lying gracefully.*

That acute metaphysician and always careful writer, Mr. Samuel Bailey, in his able investigation of the causes of belief being regarded as voluntary, refers to the habit people have of taking up opinions as a sort of party badge—which "opinions," having no dependence on the understanding, may be assumed and discarded at pleasure; but which, by partisans thus taking them up, are often maintained with more violence than such as are founded on the most thorough conviction. By thus defending opinions of which they have no clear conviction, people often succeed, says Mr. Bailey, in imposing on themselves as well as others. "Paradoxical as it may seem, it is nevertheless true, that they are not always aware of the exact state of their own minds; they frequently imagine themselves to believe more than they are actually convinced of. On many

*

"A certain respectable Dissenting minister used to draw crowded houses by announcing that he would preach at the age of more than one hundred. He corroborated his statement by a lively account of a battle in which he had won distinction in his youth. When the old gentleman died, aged one hundred and seven, in the odour of sanctity, it appeared, by examining a register, that the battle had been fought before his birth. The evidence for such cases cannot be sufficiently weighed till a proper allowance has been deducted for enormous lying. When an old man's brain is growing gradually bewildered, it would be hard to grudge him the harmless gratification of spinning incredible yarns."-Essay on Longevity, Sat. Rev., xix. 44.

questions they are not able to form any definite decision, and yet, from the necessity of professing some opinion, or joining some party, and from the habit of making assertions, and even arguing in favour of what they are thus pledged to support, they come to regard themselves as entertaining positive sentiments on points about which they are really in doubt." Notwithstanding this reserved point, practically they come to believe their own lie —that of taking up with what they are verily convinced of; and may, without much injustice, be referred to the category of Inveracities described by the metaphysical poet (Queen Anne's style) :

As folks, quoth Richard, prone to leasing,
Say things at first because they're pleasing,
Then prove what they have once asserted,
Nor care to have their lie deserted,
Till their own dreams at length deceive them,
And, oft repeating, they believe them.

AT THE TOWER WINDOW WITH SIR WALTER RALEIGH.

THE introductory discourse with which M. Guizot, some fifty years since, ushered in his first course of lectures on Modern History, opened with the familiar but always instructive story of a "statesman equally celebrated for his character and misfortunes, Sir Walter Raleigh," who, while confined in the Tower, employed himself in finishing the second part of that History of the World of which he had already published the first. A quarrel arose in one of the courts of the prison (so the story runs); he looked on attentively at the contest, which did not pass off without bloodshedding, and when he retired from the window, Sir Walter's imagination was strongly impressed by the scene that had passed under his eyes. Next day a friend came to visit him, and related what had occurred. But great was his surprise when this friend, who had been present at, and even engaged in the occurrence of the preceding day, proved to him that this event, in its results as well as in its particulars, was precisely the contrary of what he had believed he saw. Other accounts

bring in a variety of independent eye-witnesses, each with a version discrepant from and irreconcilable with the rest. At any rate, the sequel of the affair was, that Raleigh, when left alone, took up his manuscript and threw it in the fire; convinced that as he had been so completely deceived with respect to the details of an incident he had actually witnessed, he could know nothing whatever of those he had just described with his pen.

Are we better informed or more fortunate than Sir Walter Raleigh? is M. Guizot's inferential query. And his judgment is, that the most confident historian would hesitate to answer this question directly in the affirmative. For history relates a long series of events, and depicts a vast number of characters; and yet how great the difficulty of thoroughly understanding a single character or a solitary event ! It is from an infinity of details, where everything is obscure, and nothing isolated, that history is composed, and man, proud of what he knows, because he forgets to think of how much he is ignorant, believes that he has acquired a full knowledge of history when he has read what some few have told him, who had no better means of understanding the times in which they lived, than we possess of justly estimating our own.

On that memorable Opera night, in 1814, when the Prince Regent and the Allied Sovereigns appeared together in state at His Majesty's Theatre— the Princess of Wales being there also―a certain Dowager Countess, of party-giving popularity in