gests, the early history, much less the birthplace, pedigree, and juvenile associations of this worthy. Whence he or his forbears got his name or how, I don't know; but for the fact that it is to be inferred he got it in infancy, I should have thought he borrowed it; he borrowed every thing else he ever had, such things as he got under the credit system only excepted; in deference, however, to the axiom, that there is some exception to all general rules, I am willing to believe that he got this much honestly, by bona-fide gift or inheritance, and without false pretence.

I have had a hard time of it in endeavoring to assign to Bolus his leading vice; I have given up the task in despair; but I have essayed to designate that one which gave him, in the end, most celebrity. I am aware that it is invidious to make comparisons, and to give preeminence to one over other rival qualities and gifts, where all have high claims to distinction; but, then, the stern justice of criticism, in this case, requires a discrimination which, to be intelligible and definite, must be relative and comparative. I, therefore, take the responsibility of saying, after due reflection, that in my opinion, Bolus's reputation stood higher for

lying than for any thing else; and in thus assigning pre-eminence to this poetic property, I do it without any desire to derogate from other brilliant characteristics belonging to the same general category, which have drawn the wondering notice of the world.

Some men are liars from interest; not because they have no regard for truth, but because they have less regard for it than for gain; some are liars from vanity, because they would rather be well thought of by others, than have reason for thinking well of themselves; some are liars from a sort of necessity, which overbears, by the weight of temptation, the sense of virtue; some are enticed away by the allurements of pleasure, or seduced by evil example and education. Bolus was none of these; he belonged to a higher department of the fine arts, and to a higher class of professors of this sort of BellesLettres. Bolus was a natural liar, just as some horses are natural pacers, and some dogs natural setters. What he did in that walk, was from the irresistible promptings of instinct, and a disinterested love of art. His genius and his performances were free from the vulgar alloy of interest or temptation. Accordingly, he did not labor a lie; he lied with a relish; he lied with

a coming appetite, growing with what it fed on; he lied from the delight of invention and the charm of fictitious narrative. It is true he applied his art to the practical purposes of life; but in so far did he glory the more in it; just as an ingenious machinist rejoices that his invention, while it has honored science, has also supplied a common want.

Bolus's genius for lying was encyclopediacal; it was what German criticism calls many-sided. It embraced all subjects without distinction or partiality. It was equally good upon all, "from grave to gay, from lively to severe."

Bolus's lying came from his greatness of soul and his comprehensiveness of mind. The truth was too small for him. Fact was too dry and common-place for the fervor of his genius. Besides, great as was his memory-for he even remembered the outlines of his chief lies-his invention was still larger. He had a great contempt for history and historians. He thought them tame and timid cobblers; mere tinkers on other people's wares,-simple parrots and magpies of other men's sayings or doings; borrowers of and acknowledged debtors for others' chattels, got without skill; they had no separate estate in their ideas; they were bailees of

goods, which they did not pretend to hold by adverse title; buriers of talents in napkins making no usury; barren and unprofitable nonproducers in the intellectual vineyard—nati consumere fruges.

He adopted a fact occasionally to start with, but, like a Sheffield razor and the crude ore, the workmanship, polish, and value were all his own; a Thibet shawl could as well be credited to the insensate goat that grew the wool, as the author of a fact Bolus honored with his artistical skill, could claim to be the inventor of the story.

His experiments upon credulity, like charity, began at home. He had long torn down the partition wall between his imagination and his memory. He had long ceased to distinguish between the impressions made upon his mind by what came from it, and what came to it; all · ideas were facts to him.

Bolus's life was not a common man's life. His world was not the hard, work-day world. the groundlings live in; he moved in a sphere of poetry; he lived amidst the ideal and romantic. Not that he was not practical enough, when he chose to be; by no means. He bought goods and chattels, lands and tene

ments, like other men; but he got them under a state of poetic illusion, and paid for them in an imaginary way. Even the titles he gave were not of the earthy sort-they were sometimes clouded. He gave notes, too,-how well I know it !—like other men; he paid them like himself.

How well he asserted the Spiritual over the Material! How he delighted to turn an abstract idea into concrete cash-to make a few blots of ink, representing a little thought, turn out a labor-saving machine, and bring into his pocket money which many days of hard exhausting labor would not procure! What pious joy it gave him to see the days of the good Samaritan return, and the hard hand of avarice relax its grasp on land and negroes, pork and clothes, beneath the soft speeches and kind promises of future rewards-blending in the act the three cardinal virtues, Faith, Hope, and Charity; while, in the result, the chief of these three was Charity!

There was something sublime in the ideathis elevating the spirit of man to its true and primeval dominion over things of sense and grosser matter.

It is true, that in these practical romances,