Of him who confesses himself a liar, the voice must necessarily be listened to with distrust.
"Look to him well; have a quick eye to see;
He has deceiv'd another, and may thee."
By the laws of all nations, he who is once detected in perjury, is not allowed to bear further witness—the testimony of a king's evidence must be corroborated—and the confession of a felon is never allowed to prove any thing against another person.
With this caveat lector, I dismiss this entertaining and instructive narrative; for so I will call it, thinking it as full of cunning and adventure as "The Life of Guzman de Alfarache—the Spanish Rogue," if not so profoundly moralized. The religion, indeed, (if it can be so called) of Mr. Vaux is, like that of most convicts, a low sort of fatalism, which may be called a fatalism after the fact. The followers of this sect do not connect predestination with "foreknowledge absolute," but merely comfort themselves with the truism, that when their misfortunes have happened, nothing can prevent them from having happened. Of "free will," they first suffer the time for the exercise to go by, and then complain of the impotency,—abandoning themselves with an insensibility, which they mistake for resignation, to what they call the predestined and inevitable decrees of "fixed fate[1]." Some of this false complaining has been expunged from the
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"Le bien, nous le faisons; le mal, c'est le sort;
"On a toujours raison, le destin toujours tort."La Fontaine.
