Business is the ordinary means of living for nearly all of us. And in what business is there not humbug? "There's cheating in all trades but ours," is the prompt reply from the boot-maker with his brown paper soles, the grocer with his floury sugar and chicoried coffee, the butcher with his mysterious sausages and queer veal, the dry goods man with his "damaged goods wet at the great fire" and his "selling at a ruinous loss," the stock-broker with his brazen assurance that your company is bankrupt and your stock not worth a cent (if he wants to buy it,) the horse jockey with his black arts and spavined brutes, the milkman with his tin aquaria, the land agent with his nice new maps and beautiful descriptions of distant scenery, the newspaper man with his "immense circulation," the publisher with his "Great American Novel," the city auctioneer with his "Pictures by the Old Masters"--all and every one protest each his own innocence, and warn you against the deceits of the rest. My inexperienced friend, take it for granted that they all tell the truth--about each other! and then transact your business to the best of your ability on your own judgment. Never fear but that you will get experience enough, and that you will pay well for it too; and towards the time when you shall no longer need earthly goods, you will begin to know how to buy. Literature is one of the most interesting and significant expressions of humanity. Yet books are thickly peppered with humbug. "Travellers' stories" have been the scoff of ages, from the "True Story" of witty old Lucian the Syrian down to the gorillarities--if I may coin a word--of the Frenchman Du Chaillu. Ireland's counterfeited Shakspeare plays, Chatterton's forged manuscripts, George Psalmanazar's forged Formosan language, Jo Smith's Mormon Bible, (it should be noted that this and the Koran sounded two strings of humbug together--the literary and the religious,) the more recent counterfeits of the notorious Greek Simonides--such literary humbugs as these are equal in presumption and in ingenuity too, to any of a merely business kind, though usually destitute of that sort of impiety which makes the great religious humbugs horrible as well as impudent.