INGENIOUS LIES AND INDUSTRIOUS LIARS.

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume II, Issue 147, 22 December 1871, Page 5

INGENIOUS LIES AND INDUSTRIOUS LIARS.

The barefaced hoax recently perpetrated by an American writer, m the form of certain " Extraordinary Heve> lations," by a fictitious individual called Sumuierfield, who had discovered the secret of setting water on fire, lias, it seems, been surpassed. 's. Say* Francisco paper notices this hew star In the galaxy of liars thus;~ - ' i ; " We like a liar, a thoroughly conscientious, industrious, and ingenious liar. Not your ordinary prevaricator, who skirts along the cbasl 1 of truth, keeping ever within sight of the headlands and promontories of probability —-whose excursions are limited to short, fair-weather reaches into the ocean of imagination, and who paddles for port as if the devil were after him whenever a cap-ful of wind threatens a storm of exposure—rbut a bold sea-going liar *bo spurns a continent and strikes straight out for blue water, with bis eyes fixed upon the horizon of boundless mendacity. ! In the Paris correspondent of the ' Pall Mall Gazette' we recognise such an one, and our hat is now at half mast in token of profound esteem and conscious inferiority. This person gravely tells us that at the burning of tbe Archiepiscopal Palace at TEtourges, among other valuable manuscripts destroyed, was the original death warrant of Jesus Christ, signed.at Jerusalem by one Capel, and dated U.C., 783. Not only so, but he kindly favors us with a translation of it! One cannot help warming up to a man who can lie like that. Talk about Locke's * Moon hoax,' and ' Rhodes' Summer field * deception ! Compared with the altered mendacity of this tremendous fib they are as but the silly whisper of the hearthstone cricket to the shrill trumpeting of a wounded elephant—the piping of a sick cock-sparrow to the brazen clang of a donkey in love! With some impatience we await the time when this genius shall have leisure to hunt up and publish the writ of ejectment served upon Adam in Paradise."