PLEASANT ILLUSIONS.

"Where Ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise."

MADAME DE GENLIS, in her ingenious fiction of the Palace of Truth, whose inmates unconsciously uttered the real sentiments of their hearts, while they imagined themselves to be courteously pouring forth the customary amenities of politeness and flattery, has inculcated a very doubtful moral. She has proved, indeed, the hollowness and insincerity of civilised life; the ridiculous contrast between smiles upon the face, and curses on the lip; between hatred in the bosom, and compliments from the tongue: she has exposed the general inconsistency between professions and feelings, and the confusion with which most individuals would be covered, could they be aware that the suggestion of Momus had been realised, and that a window had been secretly opened in their bosoms for public inspection:-but she has at the same time convinced us, that without this amiable dissimulation and exterior falsehood, the world would be one wretched scene of ingenuous strife. It would, in fact, exhibit all the envy, hatred, and malice of her Palace of Truth, without the affability of look and demeanour which varnished them over: we should have all the nauseousness of the pill, and miss nothing but the gilding. Falsehood and duplicity may be rendered vices by their quantum or their motive, but they cannot be

essentially culpable if we admit absolute unqualified truth to be inconsistent with civilised life. Nobody can doubt that, with the unconditional exercise of this latter virtue, we should quickly degenerate into savageness. When our first parents knew sin, they put on garments; from that moment our minds have required to be clothed as carefully as our bodies, perhaps more so; for it is the skill with which we conceal deformities, assist defects, and embellish beauties, that con stitutes the charm of our moral as well as of our personal appearance.

Let the designing hypocrite be branded as he deserves-let every honest hand be furnished with a whip for the interested or malignant liar-let selfish cunning and deceit be ever, as they are now, the objects of our scorn; but, avaunt! ye rigourists and moral puritans, who would render us all a set of matter-of-fact misanthropes, who would dissipate every pleasant illusion of life, and, fishing up Truth from the bottom of that well into which the first inhabitants of the world very properly cast her, would instal her as a household deity, and the grim idol of our worship. Mistaken zealots! how could ye render her empire universal? Are there not falsehoods by implication which could not be rendered amenable to your jurisdiction? Even could ye indict a smile or a bow, and impose a fine upon complimentary superscriptions and signatures, are there not substantial infractions of your law, which, though tangible, ye cannot touch? He must be a shrewd officer of your court who shall discover and bring up for judgment

all the false teeth, false hair, eyebrows, whiskers, and legs, and the numerous other lies, whether ivory, crinical, or cork, with which our sex pass themselves off upon the world for pleasanter and more perfect beings than they would otherwise appear. He must be a still keener inquisitor who shall detail the finer subterfuges of female delinquents, and painfully undeceive mankind by verifying the simulated forms, features, and complexions of those fair impostors. Not all the gnomes and sprites of the Rosicrucians could form a police numerous enough to serve a subpoena upon every white hair that was mendaciously plucked out; to arrest every broad-cloth untruth, in the form of a dandy-jacket upon old shoulders; or confiscate the fraudulent pads and fibbing rouge of emaciated belles. Should they succeed thus far, they will have to lay informations against all constructive falsehoods in the mode of living; against rich paupers and poor spendthrifts; against married couples, who wear the semblance of peace to the public, while they carry on a private domestic war; and against every vice which pays Virtue the compliment of imitating her exterior. They must arraign, in short, all those decent forgeries and amiable impositions which give a zest to polished society, by borrowing the garb of the Graces, and throwing it becomingly around our frailties and imperfections.

Nor would their duties, though already sufficiently arduous, be terminated here. To be consistent, they must endeavour to introduce a similar uniformity of Truth into the other departments of Nature. The

bee must not offer us at the same moment honey and a sting; the snake must surrender either his poison or his painted coat; the cat must not sleek over her talons with softness; no nettles must be concealed beneath the flowers; the Siberian crab must taste as sweet as it looks; hemlock and nightshade must shed their green leaves; and our fields must nourish no types of that blooming fruit which flourished upon the borders of the Dead Sea. Truth declares the existence of evil, moral and physical; we must, therefore, use no disguises to render vice less hideous, or make our deformities less apparent; and life, embittered by the naked hatefulness of the passions, must sink into a painful disease, of which sleep will be the welcome palliative, and death the sole remedy.

There is a fanaticism of virtue as well as of religion, and the extremes of both are equally to be avoided. The Quakers have no more got rid of falsehood and bad grammar by the affectations of their phraseology, than they have conquered vanity by the elaborate plainness of their garb. As we cannot lift ourselves above human nature, all aspirations after absolute perfection are useless; while all those venial transgressions of Truth, which have an amiable motive, may safely be pronounced more praiseworthy and beneficial, than the malignant tenets of Diogenes in his tub, Timon upon the sea-shore, or the Cynic in his cell, however their virulent satires may be susceptible of proof and demonstration. Motive is every thing. He who promulgates Truth with a malicious intention, is more culpable than the man who infringes it with a bene

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volent one. So far, at least, we may hold with the anomalous dictum of the jurists, that the greater the truth, the greater the libel. "O qu'il est aimé qui rend amiable !" says Gentil Bernard: and what is this amiability but a constant deviation from the strict integrity of fact, an avoidance of unpleasant veracities, and an indulgence in soothing illusions; a benevolent endeavour to make others pleased with themselves and us, by placing the character of all parties in a better light than if we brought it within the strict focus of the rays of truth?" Where Nature has been severe," said Hoppner, the portrait-painter, we soften; where she is kind, we aggravate." Such is the art of the amiable man in painting the minds of his acquaintance, or exhibiting his own; and who would dream of accusing either the one or the other of a culpable duplicity? No, no; a pleasant deception is better than a painful reality: let us be happy in the dark, rather than be enlightened into misery. We have all our little foibles of self-love, our vanities of egotism, our illusions and inflations which may sometimes cause us, perhaps, to flutter a little too high, and enjoy ourselves out of our real sphere; but let us not anticipate the Fates in clipping one another's pinions. Alas! the best of us are but as butterflies; cut off our wings, and we are nothing but

worms.

"All the world's a stage," exclaims Shakspeare; and Champfort, enlarging upon this idea, observes:"La societé, les salons, les cercles, ce qu'on appelle le monde, est une pièce misérable, un mauvais opéra,