14.  Nothing is rarer than a solitary lie; for lies breed like Surinam toads; you cannot tell one but out it comes with a hundred young ones on its back.

15.  If the whole world should agree to speak nothing but truth, what an abridgment it would make of speech!  And what an unravelling there would be of the invisible webs which men, like so many spiders, now weave about each other!  But the contest between Truth and Falsehood is now pretty well balanced.  Were it not so, and had the latter the mastery, even language would soon become extinct, from its very uselessness.  The present superfluity of words is the result of the warfare.

16.  A witch’s skiff cannot more easily sail in the teeth of the wind, than the human eye lie against fact; but the truth will oftener quiver through lips with a lie upon them.

17.  An open brow with a clenched hand shows any thing but an open purpose.

18.  It is a hard matter for a man to lie all over.  Nature having provided king’s evidence in almost every member.  The hand will sometimes act as a vane to show which way the wind blows, when every feature is set the other way; the knees smite together, and sound the alarm of fear, under a fierce countenance; and the legs shake with anger, when all above is calm.

19.  Nature observes a variety even in her correspondences; insomuch that in parts which seem but repetitions there will be found a difference.  For instance, in the human countenance, the two sides of which are never identical.  Whenever she deviates into monotony, the deviation is always marked as an exception by some striking deficiency; as in idiots, who are the only persons that laugh equally on both sides of the mouth.

The insipidity of many of the antique Statues may be traced to the false assumption of identity in the corresponding parts.  No work wrought by feeling (which, after all, is the ultimate rule of Genius) was ever marked by this monotony.

20.  He is but half an orator who turns his hearers into spectators.  The best gestures (quoad the speaker) are those which he cannot help.  An unconscious thump of the fist or jerk of the elbow is more to the purpose, (whatever that may be,) than the most graceful cut-and-dried action.  It matters not whether the orator personates a trip-hammer or a wind-mill; if his mill but move with the grist, or his hammer knead the iron beneath it, he will not fail of his effect.  An impertinent gesture is more likely to knock down the orator than his opponent.

21.  The only true independence is in humility; for the humble man exacts nothing, and cannot be mortified,—­expects nothing, and cannot be disappointed.  Humility is also a healing virtue; it will cicatrize a thousand wounds, which pride would keep for ever open.  But humility is not the virtue of a fool; since it is not consequent upon any comparison between ourselves and others, but between what we are and what we ought to be,—­which no man ever was.