XX. IMPOSTORS. ExcusableClever - Impudent-Transparent - SpiritualistsAddison on witchcraft-Masculine women-Ancient beaux and belles Religious impostors - Misrepresentations Tracts-Formalists-New religions. THERE are defensible impostures, impostures performed for self-preservation, or from exuberance of high spirits. Professor Stewart, the eminent naturalist, at a recent meeting of the Linnæan Society, exhibited several British crabs, showing their remarkable habit of more or less completely covering their bodies with fragments of seaweed, and low-typed animals outwardly resembling plants (zoophytes). In varying proportions, different species of crabs with their nippers detach bits of marine plants, which they fasten to various exposed parts of their bodies. Continued even when they are blind, this inherited habit is not due to vanity, but results from instinctive, protective, and effective concealment, which escapes, by exact mimicry of surrounding objects, the notice of their predatory enemies. And so have men in all ages, by a clever disguise, eluded the vigilance and escaped the persecutions of their foes. Sometimes the motive is so apparent and insignificant, and yet there is so much humour in the process of attainment, that you rejoice in co-operation; it is a case of populus vult decipi et decipiatur. A friend of mine frequently conversed with some men who were engaged in making a railway outside his park, and he was addressed during one of his visits by an Irish "navvy," "And so, Sir Charles, they tell me you're an Anderson. Shure the Andersons they're gintlemen entirely. We've got 'em down in Sligo. There's one Dick Anderson; he's a chandler. He gives without asking you've a look of him!" I remember some very charming impostors, whom I met at Folkestone by the sea. They were collegians, members of a "Reading Party," preparing, without any perilous pressure upon the brain, for the examination which would follow the Long Vacation, and were full to overflow with health and merriment. But it pleased them, on the occasion to which I refer, to present themselves on the public promenade three of them as being so prostrated by extreme debility that they required invalid chairs, in which they joined the procession of veritable cripples, aged ladies, and gouty old gentlemen, each accompanied by an attendant nurse, surveying his recumbent comrade with looks of tender compassion and sad anxiety, suddenly and strangely exchanged for broad grins and unseemly laughter. "How are you feeling now, dearest?" Agonies!" I heard one of them say to his patient, who was extracting an immense cigar from his case. was the answer. "Give us a light." This little drama recalls another, performed in the University. Gavazzi was lecturing at Oxford, and had offended a large number of his hearers by his attacks on Dr. Pusey. To bring discomfiture and derision upon the obnoxious and apostate Italian, one of the undergraduates affected a most profound interest in his discourse, and became violently agitated by uncontrollable emotions. He uttered loud commentaries, "Too thrilling !-Is it possible ?—Oh, don't!" and when the lecturer proceeded to describe the horrors of the Inquisition, he first shook with terror, chattering his teeth, and calling for stimulants, and then he rose, shaking his fist, and howling with indignation, and calling upon all the members to rise as one man and to hurl the Pope into the Tiber, subsequently proposing three cheers for Guy Fawkes, and expressing his confident hope that no member of Christ Church College, then present, would retire to rest that night before he had tied a cracker to Dr. Pusey's door. Then he sank into his seat in a condition of complete collapse, buried his face in a large red pocket-handkerchief, and sobbed aloud. But when he raised his countenance, to smile his acknowledgments of the loud applause, which followed his performance, and saw the Senior Proctor, who had suddenly appeared upon the scene to restore order, and had quietly approached him-saw those velvet S sleeves, which are a terror to all evil-doers, and met his solemn gaze "A moment o'er his face A tablet of unutterable thoughts was traced," and then the kindly Don joined in the universal and irresistible mirth, and the lecturer, not liking that particular phase of protestantism, abruptly concluded. From the same considerations, we not only excuse but admire the harmless, impossible exaggerations of certain advertisements, which are imposing, without being impostures, from their brilliant inventive genius. We have not implicit confidence, for example, in those pictorial announcements of Cures for the Toothache, which represent to us, on the one side, a gentleman in great dental distress, whose swollen countenance suggests the concealment in either cheek of a large Newtown pippin, and, on the other side, the same face, minus the inflammation, radiant with joy and health and beauty, and underneath we read the words of happy exultation, "Ha ha! cured in an instant !" Nor do those portraits obtain our immediate and steadfast faith, although, in accord with their intention, they may encourage hope, which present to us first a head hairless as a cannon-ball, as it appeared before the proprietor was induced to try the celebrated Golden Oil, and then the same pericranium covered, after a few applications, with an abundance of glossy curls! To show that it is possible to adopt abnormal and attractive modes of advertisement without straining the reader's credulity, I would cite the following examples : "What made me lay awake at night, "What made me howl and yell with pain, "What eased my troubled nerves of pain, And set me on my legs again? A consultation with Mr. Barker, Surgeon Dentist, Town Hall Street, Grimsby." And, again, the poetic advertiser pleasantly and cleverly induces an inclination to purchase, when, having reminded us how refreshing it is— "To come with jaded spirit home at night, At which, in dress of happy cheeks and eyes, he proceeds to inform us that for fifty years Horniman's Pure Tea, rich, strong, delicious, has been sold by 4000 agents in 1000 towns. Descending from honest men and venial romance to the impostors, I was going to say pur et simple, but they are neither one nor the other, to the rogues, whose designs are evil and their methods base, even |