Knowing the great conveniences of this habit, and being masters of our tongues, the fault lies with us if we cannot touch whatever chord in the nature of our fellows that we wish to arouse. To attain this degree of perfection, however, we should be properly schooled. Ever since the times of Thauth, Hermes, and Cadmus, many have endeavored to excel in efforts to reduce the gift of speech to writing, and to regular rules and systems. Every variety of sciences, whatever their pretensions, have so used it as best to promote their interests, inventing new words, or assigning strange meanings to old ones, whenever occasion required. It has been the great fountain and support of every excellence of which we know, and the powerful medium of every humbug that has heretofore cursed society. It may, therefore, appear strange that no one has yet, for the great benefit of mankind in general, resorted to it for the elements to establish, as a distinct profession, the art of well and skillfully framing a falsehood. The schools of philosophy have settled it that men may lie. Whether they have done so upon the strength of the bold opinion of the crafty Lysander, that truth and falsehood are indifferent things; or upon the comprehensive saying of Sophocles, “I judge no speech amiss that is of use;” or upon the more designing maxim of the Spaniard, “tell a lie and you will get out the truth;” or upon the anatomical principle of the petit Prince of Bantam, which will certainly be admired by our modern physiologists, “my tongue has no bone in it to make it more stiff than is necessary for my interest;” it is not material here to determine. Suffice it; that it has been so settled, and as our practices conform to so enlightened a decision, policy would seem to require that they be reduced to regular and systematic rules. It is true, some have manifested considerable anxiety to secure for this habit a kind of scientific distinction. They have accordingly had resort to the stars, or if despairing of flights so lofty, the hand or a pack of cards answered equally well to tell a fortune by. Though their plans and schemes were sufficiently ingenious, lying itself could not endure them. They could hope for no proselytes except amongst the credulous, and even amongst those they could only gain such as believed there was as much “pleasure in being cheated as to cheat.” Thus their efforts in this excellent work, have not only been defeated, notwithstanding the high encouragement they sometimes received, but if Euripides speaks to the purpose, they themselves have been made to feel the consequences of their mistakes: “What’s an Astrologer? I thus reply, A man who speaks few truths, but many a lie, Which, when found out, he takes his heels to fly.”