which cannot comprehend and apply such trivial artifices: every one may arrive at doing this; but a noble understanding, discerning the baseness of them, abominates such practices; although the vulgar, to whose bastard dispositions they are better suited, embrace them with eagerness. Dissimulation, so far from requiring an exalted understanding to support and carry it on, requires none at all, for we see some irrational animals who exercise it with great address. The foxes are very expert at it, but that does not in any wise render their nature superior to that of brutes; and I repeat again, that I never knew an understanding that had any thing of the elevated or sublime in its composition, that did not abhor all duplicity and fraud. CV. If we see this matter in the other extreme point of view, we shall find it liable to great equivocation. It frequently happens, that a man of very pure virtue, who has somewhat of native dryness or bluntness in his composition, appears to those of rude and uncultivated capacities, as a person of a depraved disposition. Those who are zealous lovers of truth and justice, are accustomed, not always to accommodate themselves to those courteous condescensions; by which people acquire popular acceptation; as by attending to the substance of things, they are apt to overlook forms and ceremonies. Words from their mouths, signify what the sound and sense of them express: they confider courteous dissimulation as a treacherous enemy of virtue; and are ignorant of the art of painting vice in counterfeit colours, for the sake of pleasing or flattering any man; but on the contrary, are always careful to describe it so, as that it may appear in its true native shape, and in all its deformity. The more prevalent lying, deceit, and perfidy is, the more they loath and nauseate it, and are observed to be more strict and severe in their reprehensions of it; and besides, they never look smilingly, but upon those in whom they perceive a clean mind. This unpleasing integrity, is regarded by the bulk of the world, as a kind of misanthropy, or malevolence towards the generality of mankind; and the number of those, who busy themselves in painting such men, as impracticable, perverse, and ill-intentioned is infinite; for they are pleasing but to very few, as there are but few who are pleased with them; so that either from the malice of their opponents, or from the want of a proper knowledge of the world in those that are indifferent with respect to their opinions of them, it easily comes to pass, that a man of exalted and sincere virtue, is often looked upon by a whole town, as a person of intentional malignity.