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A LION, unable from old age and infirmities to provide himself with food by force, resolved to do so by artifice. He returned to his den, and lying down there, pretended to be sick, taking care that his sickness should be publicly known. The beasts expressed their sorrow, and came one by one to his den, where the Lion devoured them.
Have you talents? it is criminal to indulge them in public; and thus, as talent cannot be stifled, it is misdirected in private; you seek ascendency over your own limited circle; and what should have been genius degenerates into cunning. Brought up from your cradles to dissembling your most beautiful emotions your finest principles are always tinctured with artifice.
We find our graves not in the ground but in the hearts of our survivors, and our slightest actions vibrate in ever-widening circles through incalculable time. Any end, therefore, to a novel or a play, must be in the nature of an artifice; and an ending must be planned not in accordance with life, which is lawless and illogical, but in accordance with art, whose soul is harmony.
Paris, suppressing its scruples, its conscientious and unconscientious hatreds, at least for a season, had adorned herself as that fascinating city always has been able to adorn herself, if with something of artifice, certainly with great completeness, almost to illusion. Whatever gloom the Middle Age with its sins and sorrows might have left there, was under gallant disguise to-day.
To enforce the pained impotent to smile. But still, through all, he is true to his chosen manner: that gloss of dainty language is a second nature with him: even at his best he is not without a certain artifice: the trick of playing on words never deserts him; and Shakespeare, in whose own genius there is an element of this very quality, shows us in this graceful, and, as it seems, studied, portrait, his enjoyment of it.
Artifice and trickery thus triumphed over the Emperor, at the moment when he was believed to be omnipotent in Germany, and actually was so in the field. With the loss of 18,000 men, and of a general who alone was worth whole armies, he left Ratisbon without gaining the end for which he had made such sacrifices.
No form of courtesy had, in fact, been wanting. "He appeared to be extremely complaisant," says Washington, "though he was exerting every artifice to set our Indians at variance with us. I saw that every stratagem was practised to win the Half-King to their interest."
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 had left her presence without a word of encouragement, because of that engagement. But he believed that Lizzie was sincere. He believed, now, that she was genuine; though he had previously been all but sure that falsehood and artifice were second nature to her. At Bobsborough he met his constituents, and made them the normal autumn speech.
When she had appointed Fagon physician of the King in place of Daquin, whom she dismissed, she had a doctor upon whom she could certainly rely, and she played the sick woman accordingly, after those scenes with the King, and in this manner turned them to her own advantage. It was not that this artifice had any power in constraining the King, or that a real illness would have had any.
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