he 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 a Kempis's
"Imitation of Christ,"--a book who