and I think a lie a very useful invention.  It is like a coat or a pair of breeches, it serves to clothe the naked.  But do not throw your falsifications away:  I like a proper economy.  Some silly persons would have you invariably speak the truth.  My friends, if you were to act in this way, in what department of commerce could you succeed?  How could you get on in the law? what vagabond would ever employ you to defend his cause?  What practice do you think you would be likely to procure as a physician, if you were to tell every old woman who fancied herself ill, that there was nothing the matter with her, or to prescribe abstinence to an alderman, as a cure for indigestion?  What would be your prospect in the church, where, not to mention a few other little trifles, you would have, when you came to be made a bishop, to say that you did not wish to be any such thing?  No, my friends, truth is all very well when the telling of it is convenient; but when it is not, give me a bouncing lie.  But that one lie, object the advocates of uniform veracity, will require twenty more to make it good:  very well, then, tell them.  Ever have a due regard to the sanctity of oaths; this you will evince by never using them to support a fiction, except on high and solemn occasions, such as when you are about to be invested with some public dignity.  But avoid any approach to a superstitious veneration for them:  it is to keep those thin-skinned and impracticable individuals who are infected by this failing from the management of public affairs, that they have been, in great measure, devised.

Never break a promise, unless bound to do so by a previous one; and promise yourselves from this time forth never to do anything that will put you to inconvenience.

Never take what does not belong to you.  For, as a young pupil who formerly attended these lectures pathetically expressed himself, he furnishing, at the time, in his own person, an illustration of the maxim—­

  “Him as prigs wot isn’t his’n,
  Ven ’a’s cotch must go to pris’n!”

But what is it that does not belong to you?  I answer, whatever you cannot take with impunity.  Never fail, however, to appropriate that which the law does not protect.  This is a duty which you owe to yourselves.  And in order that you may thoroughly carry out this principle, procure, if you can, a legal education; because there are a great many flaws in titles, agreements, and the like, the knowledge of which will often enable you to lay hands upon various kinds of property to which at first sight you might appear to have no claim.  Should you ever be so circumstanced as to be beyond the control of the law, you will, of course, be able to take whatever you want; because there will be nothing then that will not belong to you.  This, my friends, is a grand moral principle; and, as illustrative of it, we have an example (as schoolboys say in their themes) in Alexander the Great; and besides, in all other conquerors that have ever lived, from Nimrod down to Napoleon inclusive.