nspection,
proves to have the exact features of a knave? Nay, in much more
intimate acquaintances, how a delusion of this kind shall continue
for months, years, and then break up all at once.

Ask the married man, who has been so but for a short space of time,
if those blue eyes where, during so many years of anxious courtship,
truth, sweetness, serenity, seemed to be written in characters which
could not be misunderstood--ask him if the characters which they now
convey be exactly the same?--if for truth he does not _read_ a dull
virtue (the mimic of constancy) which changes not, only because it
wants the judgment to make a preference?--if for sweetness he does
not _read_ a stupid habit of looking pleased at everything?--if for
serenity he does not _read_ animal tranquillity, the dead pool of the
heart, which no breeze of passion can stir into health? Alas! what is
this book of the countenance good for, which when we have read so
long, and thought that we understood its contents, there comes a
countless list of heart-breaking errata at the end!

But these are the pitiable mistakes to which love alone is subject. I
have inadvertently wandered from my purpose, which was to expose
quite an opposite blunder, into which we are no less apt to fall,
through hate. How ugly a person looks upon whose reputation some
awkward aspersion hangs, and how suddenly his countenance clears up
with his character! I remember being persuaded of a man whom I had
conceived an ill opinion of, that he had a very bad set of teeth;
which, since I have had better opportunities of being acquainted with
his face and facts, I find to have been the very reverse of the
truth. _That crooked old woman_, I once said, speaking of an ancient
gentlewoman, whose actions did not square altogether with my notions
of the rule of right. The unanimous surprise of the company before
whom I uttered these words soon convinced me that I had confounded
mental with bodily obliquity, and that there was nothing tortuous
about the old lady but her deeds.

This humor of mankind to deny personal comeliness to those with whose
moral attributes they are dissatisfied, is very strongly shown in
those advertisements which stare us in the face from the walls of
every street, and, with the tempting bait which they hang forth,
stimulate at once cupidity and an abstract love of justice in the
breast of every passing peruser: I mean, the advertisements offering
rewards for the appre