The Adventurer Author:John Hawkesworth Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: panions of his prowess, and tell with rapture of the multitudes whom unsuccessful emulation has hurried to the grave: even the robber and the cut-throat have the... more »ir followers, who admire their address and intrepidity, their stratagems of rapine, and their fidelity to the gang. The liar, and only the liar, is invariably and universally despised, abandoned, and disowned : he has no domestic consolations which he can oppose to the censure of mankind; he can retire to no fraternity, where his crimes may stand in the place of virtues; but is given up to the hisses of the multitude, without friend and without apologist. It is the peculiar condition of falsehood, to be equally detested by the good and bad: ' The devils,' says sir Thomas Brown, ' do not tell lies to one another; for truth is necessary to all societies: nor can the society of hell subsist without it.' It is natural to expect, that a crime thus generally detested should be generally avoided ; at least that none should expose himself to unabated and unpitied infamy, without an adequate temptation; and that to guilt so easily detected, and so severely punished, an adequate temptation would not readily be found. Yet so it is, that in defiance of censure and contempt, truth is frequently violated; and scarcely the most vigilant and unremitted circumspection will secure him that mixes with mankind, from being hourly deceived by men of whom it can scarcely be imagined, that they mean any injury to him or profit to themselves; even where the subject of conversation could not have been expected to put the passions in motion, or to have excited either hope or fear, or zeal or malignity, sufficient to induce any man to put his reputation in hazard, however little he might value it, or tooverpower the love of truth, however we...« less