42.  A lyar of this kind, with a strong memory or brisk imagination, is often the oracle of an obscure club, and, till time discovers his impostures, dictates to his hearers with uncontrolled authority:  for if a public question be started, he was present at the debate; if a new fashion be mentioned, he was at court the first day of its appearance; if a new performance of literature draws the attention of the public, he has patronized the author, and seen his work in manuscript; if a criminal of eminence be condemned to die, he often predicted his fate, and endeavoured his reformation; and who that lives at a distance from the scene of action, will dare to contradict a man, who reports from his own eyes and ears, and to whom all persons and affairs are thus intimately known?

45.  This kind of falsehood is generally successful for a time, because it is practised at first with timidity and caution; but the prosperity of the lyar is of short duration; the reception of one story is always an incitement to the forgery of another less probable; and he goes on to triumph over tacit credulity, till pride or reason rises up against him, and his companions will no longer endure to see him wiser than themselves.

44.  It is apparent, that the inventors of all these fictions intend some exaltation of themselves, and are led off by the pursuit of honour from their attendance upon truth:  their narratives always imply some consequence in favor of their courage, their sagacity, or their activity, their familiarity with the learned, or their reception among the great; they are always bribed by the present pleasure of seeing themselves superior to those that surround them, and receiving the homage of silent attention and envious admiration.

45.  But vanity is sometimes excited to fiction by less visible gratifications:  the present age abounds with a race of lyars who are content with the consciousness of falsehood, and whose pride is to deceive others without any gain or glory to themselves.  Of this tribe it is the supreme pleasure to remark a lady in the play-house or the park, and to publish, under the character of a man suddenly enamoured, an advertisement in the news of the next day, containing a minute description of her person and her dress.

46.  From this artifice, however, no other effect can be expected, than perturbations which the writer can never see, and conjectures of which he can never be informed:  some mischief, however, he hopes he has done; and to have done mischief is of some importance.  He sets his invention to work again, and produces a narrative of a robbery, or a murder, with all the circumstances of the time and place accurately adjusted.  This is a jest of greater effect and longer duration.  If he fixes his scene at a proper distance, he may for several days keep a wife in terror for her husband, or a mother for her son; and please himself with reflecting, that by his abilities and address some addition is made to the miseries of life.