And as nothing is so ridiculous, so, few things are so mischievous, as the sincere insincerity, the estrangement from fact, of those who have thus parted with themselves. It is worse, if anything can be worse, than hypocrisy itself. The hypocrite sees two things,--the fact and the fiction, the gold and its counterfeit; he has virtue enough to know that he is a hypocrite. But the _post-mortem_ man, the walking legacy, does not recognize the existence of eternal Fact; it has never occurred to his mind that anything could be more serious than "spiritual taking-on" and make-belief. An innocent old gentleman, being at a play where the heroine is represented as destroyed in attempting to cross a broken bridge, rose, upon seeing her approach it, and in tones of the deepest concern offered his opinion that said bridge was unsafe! The _post-mortem_ man reverses this harmless blunder, and makes it anything but harmless by the change; as that one took theatricals to be earnest fact, so this conceives virtue itself to consist in posturing; he thinks gold a clever imitation of brass, and the azure of the sky to be a kind of celestial cosmetic; in fine, formalities are the realest things he knows. It is said, that, in the later days of Rome, the augurs and inspectors of entrails could not look each other in the face during their ceremonies, for fear of bursting into a laugh. But still worse off than these pitiful peddlers of fraud is he who feigns without knowing that he feigns,--feigns unfeignedly, and calls God to witness that he is faithful in the performance of his part. This is ape's earnest, and is, perhaps, the largest piece of waste that ever takes place upon this earth. _Ape's earnest_,--it is a pit that swallows whole nations, whole ages; and the extent to which it may be carried is wellnigh incredible, even with the fact before our eyes. A Chinese gentleman spends an hour in imploring a relative to dine with him,--utterly refusing, so urgent is his desire of company, to accept No for an answer,--and then flies into a rage because the cousin commits the _faux pas_ of yielding to his importunity, and agreeing to dine. Louis Napoleon perpetrates the king-joke of the century by solemnly presenting the Russian Czar with a copy of Thomas à Kempis's "Imitation of Christ,"--a book whose great inculcation is to renounce the world!