did you ever see any thing like Lady Godiva Trotter's dress last night? People will go on chattering, although we hold our tongues; and, after all, my good soul, what will their scandal matter a hundred years hence?

SMALL-BEER CHRONICLE.

OT long since, at a

certain banquet, I

had the good fortune to sit by Doctor Polymathesis, who knows every thing, and who, about the time when the claret made its appearance, mentioned that old dictum of the grumbling Oxford Don, that "ALL CLARET

would be port if it could!" Imbibing a bumper of one or the other not ungratefully, I thought to myself, "Here surely, Mr. Roundabout, is a good text for one of your reverence's sermons." Let us apply to the human race, dear brethren, what is here said of the vintages of Portugal and Gascony, and we shall have no difficulty in perceiving how many clarets aspire to be ports in their way; how most men and women of our acquaintance, how we ourselves, are Aquitanians giving ourselves Lusitanian airs; how we wish to

have credit for being stronger, braver, more beautiful, more worthy than we really are.

Nay, the beginning of this hypocrisy-a desire to excel, a desire to be hearty, fruity, generous, strengthimparting is a virtuous and noble ambition; and it is most difficult for a man in his own case, or his neighbor's, to say at what point this ambition transgresses the boundary of virtue, and becomes vanity, pretense, and self-seeking. You are a poor man, let us say, showing a bold face to adverse fortune, and wearing a confident aspect. Your purse is very narrow, but you owe no man a penny; your means are scanty, but your wife's gown is decent; your old coat well brushed; your children at a good school; you grumble to no one; ask favors of no one; truckle to no neighbors on account of their superior rank, or (a worse, and a meaner, and a more common crime still) envy none for their better fortune. To all outward appearances you are as well to do as your neighbors, who have thrice your income. There may be in this case some little mixture of pretension in your life and behavior. You certainly do put on a smiling face while fortune is pinching you. Your wife and girls, so smart and neat at evening parties, are cutting, patching, and cobbling all day to make both ends of life's haberdashery meet. You give a friend a bottle of wine on occasion, but are content yourself with a glass of whisky and water. You avoid a cab, saying that of all things you like to walk home after dinner (which you know, my good friend, is a fib). I grant you that in this scheme of life there does enter ever so little hypocrisy; that this claret is loaded, as it were;

when sick; we supplied him with little comforts and extras which need not now be remembered; and the grateful creature rewarded us by informing some of our tradesmen whom he honored with his custom, "Mr. Roundabout? Lor bless you! I carry him up to bed drunk every night in the week"-he, Tomkins, being a man of seven stone weight and five feet high, whereas his employer was-but here modesty interferes, and I decline to enter into the avoirdupois question.

Now, what was Tomkins's motive for the utterance and dissemination of these lies? They could further no conceivable end or interest of his own. Had they been true stories, Tomkins's master would still, and reasonably, have been more angry than at the fables. It was but suicidal slander on the part of Tomkinsmust come to a discovery-must end in a punishment. The poor wretch had got his place under, as it turned out, a fictitious character. He might have staid in it, for of course Tomkins had a wife and poor innocent children. He might have had bread, beer, bed, character, coats, coals. He might have nestled in our little island, comfortably sheltered from the storms of life; but we were compelled to cast him out, and send him driving, lonely, perishing, tossing, starving, to sea -to drown. To drown? There be other modes of death whereby rogues die. Good-by, Tomkins. And so the night-cap is put on, and the bolt is drawn for poor T.

Suppose we were to invite volunteers among our respected readers to send in little statements of the lies which they know have been told about them

selves; what a heap of correspondence, what an exaggeration of malignities, what a crackling bonfire of incendiary falsehoods might we not gather together! And a lie once set going, having the breath of life breathed into it by the father of lying, and ordered to run its diabolical little course, lives with a prodigious vitality. You say, "Magna est veritas et prævalebit." Pshaw! Great lies are as great as great truths, and prevail constantly, and day after day. Take an instance or two out of my own little budget. I sit near a gentleman at dinner, and the conversation turns upon a certain anonymous literary performance which at the time is amusing the town. "Oh," says the gentleman, "every body knows who wrote that paper; it is Momus's." I was a young author at the time, perhaps proud of my bantling: "I beg your pardon," I say, "it was written by your humble servant." "Indeed!" was all that the man replied, and he shrugged his shoulders, turned his back, and talked to his other neighbor. I never heard sarcastic incredulity more finely conveyed than by that "indeed."

แ

Impudent liar," the gentleman's face said, as clear as face could speak. Where was Magna Veritas, and how did she prevail then? She lifted up her voice, she made her appeal, and she was kicked out of court. In New York I read a newspaper criticism one day (by an exile from our shores who has taken up his abode in the Western Republic), commenting upon a letter of mine which had appeared in a contemporary volume, and wherein it was stated that the writer was a lad in such and such a year, and, in point of fact, I was, at the period spoken of, nineteen years of age.