CHAP. VIII.

LIES OF FIRST-RATE MALIGNITY.

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LIES OF FIRST-RATE MALIGNITY Come next to be considered: and I think that I am right in asserting that such lies, lies intended wilfully to destroy the reputation of men and women, to injure their characters in publick or private estimation, and for ever cloud over their prospects in life,— are less frequent than falsehoods of any other description.

Not that malignity is an unfrequent feeling; not that dislike, or envy, or jealousy, would not gladly vent itself in many a malignant falsehood,

or other efforts of the same kind, against the peace and fame of its often innocent and unconscious objects;—but that the arm of the law, in some measure at least, defends reputations and if it should not have been able to deter the slanderer from his purpose, it can at least avenge the slandered.

Still, such is the prevailing tendency, in society, to prey on the reputations of others (especially of those who are at all distinguished, either in publick or private life); such the propensity to impute BAD MOTIVES to GOOD ACTIONS; so common the fiendlike pleasure of finding or imagining blemishes in beings on whom even a motive-judging world in general gazes with respectful admiration, and bestows the sacred tribute of well-earned praise; that I am convinced there are

many persons, worn both in mind and body by the consciousness of being the objects of calumnies and suspicions which they have it not in their power to combat, who steal brokenhearted to their graves, thankful for the summons of death, and hoping to find refuge from the injustice of their fellow-creatures in the bosom of their God and Saviour.

With the following illustration of the LIE OF FIRST-RATE MALIGNITY I shall conclude my observations on this subject.

THE ORPHAN.

THERE are persons in the world whom circumstances have so entirely preserved from intercourse with the base and the malignant, and whose

dispositions are so free from bitterness, that they can scarcely believe in the existence of baseness and malignity. Such persons, when they hear of injuries committed, and wrongs done, at the instigation of the most trivial and apparently worthless motives, are apt to exclaim, "You have been imposed upon. No one could be so wicked as to act thus upon such slight grounds; and you are not relating as a sober observer of human nature and human action, but with the exaggerated view of a dealer in fiction and romance!" Happy, and privileged beyond the ordinary charter of human beings, are those who can thus exclaim; but the inhabitants of the tropics might, with equal justice, refuse to believe in the existence of that thing called snow, as these unbelievers in the moral turpitude in question

refuse their credence to anecdotes which disclose it. All they can with propriety assert is, that such instances have not come under their cognizance. Yet, even to these favoured few, I would put the following questions:

Have you never experienced feelings of selfishness, anger, jealousy, or envy, which, though habits of religious and moral restraint taught you easily to subdue them, had yet troubled you long enough to make you fully sensible of their existence and their power? If so, is it not easy to believe that such feelings, when excited in the minds of those not under religious and moral guidance, may grow to such an unrestrained excess as to lead to actions and lies of terrible malignity?

I cannot but think that even the purest and best of my friends must answer in the affirmative. Still, they