oisy merriment or silent
insensibility, who will celebrate his victories over the novices of
intemperance, boast themselves the companions of his prowess, and tell
with rapture of the multitudes whom unsuccessful emulation has hurried
to the grave: even the robber and the cut-throat have their followers,
who admire their address and intrepidity, their stratagems of rapine,
and their fidelity to the gang.

33. The lyar, and only the lyar, is invariably and universally despised,
abandoned and disowned: he has no domestic consolations, which he can
oppose to the censure of mankind; he can retire to no fraternity where
his crimes may stand in the place of virtues, but is given up to the
hisses of the multitude, without friend and without apologist. It is the
peculiar condition of falsehood, to be equally detested by the good and
bad: "The devils," says Sir _Thomas Brown_, "do not tell lies to one
another; for truth is necessary to all societies; nor can the society of
hell subsist without it."

34. It is natural to expect, that a crime thus generally detested,
should be generally avoided; at least that none should expose himself to
unabated and unpitied infamy, without an adequate temptation; and that
to guilt so easily detected, and so severely punished, an adequate
temptation would not readily be found.

35. Yet so it is, that in defiance of censure and contempt, truth is
frequently violated; and scarcely the most vigilant unremitted
circumspection will secure him that mixes with mankind, from being
hourly deceived by men of whom it can scarcely be imagined, that they
mean an injury to him or profit to themselves; even where the subject of
conversation could not have been expected to put the passions in motion,
or to have excited either hope or fear, or zeal or malignity, sufficient
to induce any man to put his reputation in hazard, however little he
might value it, or to overpower the love of truth, however weak might be
its influence.

36. The casuists have very diligently distinguished lies into their
several classes, according to their various degrees of malignity; but
they have, I think, generally omitted that which is most common, and,
perhaps, not less mischievous; which, since the moralists have not given
it a name, I shall distinguish as the lie of vanity.

To vanity may justly be imputed most of the falsehoods which every man
perceives hourly playing upon his ear, and perhaps most of those that
are propaga