Erasure

“ Over and above these trifling penalties, his name was erased and blotted out from the roll of attorneys; which erasure has been always held in these latter times to be a great degradation and reproach, and to imply the commission of some amazing villany—as indeed it would seem to be the case, when so many worthless names remain among its better records, unmolested. ”

“ I. Erasures.—The question—What is the effect of an erasure, an interlineation, or alteration apparent in a material part of a deed above thirty years old, when offered in evidence?—has led to much discussion both among professional and general readers of this work, as well at home as abroad; and many communications upon the subject have been received by the author. Lord Widdrington at the trial, and subsequently he and the full court, held, in the case of Doe d. Titmouse v. ”

“ A fair white sheet with handsomely written words will be more welcome to any reader than a blotted, bedaubed page covered with erasures and dirt, even if the matter in each be of equal value and interest. Erasures, blots, interlineations always spoil the beauty of any letter. ”

“ Even the grave and solemn document of their last Annual Report—or which ought to have been grave and solemn—is so rude, violent, and denunciatory—so much like a tear-all-down—that the nerves of a well composed person, as we will venture to say, will be not a little dis-composed in the reading thereof. ”

“ When we take this view, we are no longer troubled by the numerous mistakes, even to the order of the kings, which so greatly reduce the value of the document where its testimony is most needed. [Footnote: Cf. Winckler, AOF. I. 109 ff.] We can understand such "mistakes" in a display inscription, exposed to view in a place where it would not be safe for an individual to point out the truth. ”

“ On many a mind and many a heart there are sad inscriptions deeply engraved by the tongue of slander, which no effort can erase. They are more durable than the impression of the diamond on the glass, for the inscription on the glass may be destroyed by a blow, but the impression on the heart will last forever. Let not the sting of calumny sink too deeply in your soul. He who is never subject to slander is generally of too little mental account to be worthy of it. ”

“ If you have a design for a name of honour when you are dead, consider what power a prevailing faction may have to corrupt the history of your life, and represent you to posterity perfectly contrary to what you are; and how impossible it is for posterity to know whose history is the product of malicious, shameless lies, and whose is the narrative of impartial truth. ”

“ Hence, Heraldry was brought into disrepute, and even into contempt, by the very persons who loved it with a genuine but a most unwise love. In process of time, no nonsense appeared too extravagant, and no fable too wild, to be engrafted upon the grave dignity of the Herald’s early science. Better times at length have succeeded. Heraldry now has friends and admirers, zealous as of old, whose zeal is guided aright by a sound judgment in alliance with a pure taste. ”

“ Of all secret crimes buried in the mystery of private life, the most disgraceful is that of breaking the seal of a letter, or of reading it surreptitiously. Every one, whoever it may be, and urged by whatever reason, who is guilty of such an act has stained his honor beyond retrieving. ”

“ Is fame, my lords, that fame which cannot err? a report that flies, on a sudden, through a nation, of which no man can discover the original; a sudden blast of rumour, that inflames or intimidates a people, and obtains, without authority, a general credit? No man versed in history can inquire whether such reports may not deceive. Is fame rather a settled opinion, prevailing by degrees, and for some time established? How long, then, my lords, and in what degree must it have been established, to obtain undoubted credit, and when does it commence infallible? ”

“ He then goes on to the other side of the picture: “for history without truth becomes undeserving of its name.” “These people are no less light in mind than in body, and by no means to be relied on. They are easily urged to undertake any action, and as easily checked from prosecuting it.... They never scruple at taking a false oath for the sake of any temporary advantage.... Above all other peoples they are given to removing their neighbours’ landmarks. ”

“ We observe even among the vulgar, how fond they are to have an inscription over their grave. It requires but little philosophy to discover and observe that there is no intrinsick value in all this; however, if it be founded in our nature, as an incitement to virtue, it ought not to be ridiculed. ”

“ When your sentence shall have sent him forth to that stage which guilt alone can render infamous, let me tell you he will not be like a little statue upon a mighty pedestal, diminishing by elevation, but he will stand a striking and imposing object upon a monument which, if it does not, and it can not, record the atrocity of his crime, must record the atrocity of his conviction. ”

“ The older writers were striving, consciously or unconsciously, to reconcile the disgrace of illegitimacy, which they knew, with heraldic facts which they also knew, and to reconcile in certain prominent families undoubted illegitimacy with unmarked arms, the probability being that their sense of justice and regard for heraldry prompted them to the remark that some other mark of distinction ought to be added, whilst all the time they knew it never was. ”

“ ABHORSON. Ay, sir; a mystery.
POMPEY. Painting, sir, I have heard say, is a mystery; and your
whores, sir, being members of my occupation, using painting,
do
prove my occupation a mystery; but what mystery there should
be
in hanging, if I should be hang'd, I cannot imagine.
ABHORSON. Sir, it is a mystery.
POMPEY. Proof?
ABHORSON. Every true man's apparel fits your thief: if it be
too
little for your thief, your true man thinks it big enough; if
it
be too big for your thief, your thief thinks it little
enough; so
every true man's apparel fits your thief. ”

“ Some day I hope you may be compelled to face that lying old record of yours and that lightning flashes of guilt may be made to blaze into your treacherous eyes from out those pages that looked so clean when you showed them off, while the thunder of outraged truth rolls about your head till your teeth chatter in your mouth and your bones shake in your deceitful skin. ”

“ These struldbrugs and I, would mutually communicate our observations and memorials, through the course of time; remark the several gradations by which corruption steals into the world, and oppose it in every step, by giving perpetual warning and instruction to mankind; which, added to the strong influence of our own example, would probably prevent that continual degeneracy of human nature, so justly complained of in all ages. ”

“ For I have come, not from obscurity into the momentary notoriety of crime, but from a sort of eternity of fame to a sort of eternity of infamy, and sometimes seem to myself to have shown, if indeed it required showing, that between the famous and the infamous there is but one step, if as much as one. ”

“ What a difference between the grave, clear, solid, laborious stile of the speech here given, and the crude metaphysics, false glitter, and trifling witticism of a modern legal oration! The 398truth is, that the affectation of philosophy and fine taste has spoiled every thing; and instead of the honest seriousness and simplicity of old English reasoning in law, in politics, in morality, in all the grave concerns of life, we have nothing left but a mixed species of bastard sophistry, got between ignorance and vanity, and generating nothing. ”

“ In the vast archives of human torment the narrative fills but a brief paragraph; and therein all that pitiful history, to the last secret tear and the last act of malice, to the last noble self-denial and unanswered prayer, is recorded, to endure for time. ”

“ On the revival of letters, when the judgment of the public is yet raw and unformed, this false glitter catches the eye, and leaves no room, either in eloquence or poetry, for the durable beauties of solid sense and lively passion. ”

“ By thy decree was spilt,
Whose head, upon the charger brought,
Appeased revengeful guilt,
His name, amid a deathless page,
Gleams forth with living ray,
While all thy royalty and pride
Are swept like foam away. ”

“ Every one took up the letter, every one examined it, read the obnoxious sentence over and over again, and when they were all perfectly convinced, that this abominable libel upon their much adored master existed, there arose a tumultuous uproar, during which, every person endeavoured to vent his anger, by uttering the most contradictory imprecations, mingled with the most pathetic exclamations. ”

“ A statuary may give a false expression to your bust, or decorate it with some equivocal emblems, by which you may happen to steal into reputation and impose upon the hereafter traditionary world. Ill nature or ridicule may conspire, or a variety of accidents combine to lessen, enlarge, or change Sir William's fame ”

“ Well, yes; to abstract a name and place one's self under it is dishonest. The letters of the alphabet may be filched like a purse or a watch. To be a false signature in flesh and blood, to be a living false key, to enter among honest folk by picking their lock, never to look, but always to squint, to be internally infamous,—no! ”

“ Well; the disclosure of the document to a third person, who shall be nameless, would bring in question the honour of a personage of most exalted station; and this fact gives the holder of the document an ascendency over the illustrious personage whose honour and peace are so jeopardized."
"But this ascendency," I interposed, "would depend upon the robber's knowledge of the loser's knowledge of the robber. Who would dare—" [7]
"The thief," said G——, "is the Minister D——, who dares all things, those unbecoming as well as those becoming a man. ”

“ Instead, the idea that an order so noble, so heroic in its history, so rich in symbolism, so skilfully adjusted, and with so many traces of remote antiquity, was the creation of pious fraud, or else of an ingenious conviviality, passes the bounds of credulity and enters the domain of the absurd. ”

“ There are wrongs which even the grave does not bury. ”

“ Every sentence was an accusation, and every accusation a truth. Every clause was freighted with sarcasm and derision, every slow-dropping word burned like vitriol. The dwarf reminded me of times when I had flown at my children in anger and punished them for faults which a little inquiry would have taught me that others, and not they, had committed. ”

“ I demanded. “In these circumstances of grave suspicion, and of the theft of the secret which is my property by right, it is surely your duty to explain what you know, in order that we may gain a clue? Recollect, too, that the future of his daughter depends upon the truth being revealed.” ”

“ Why should a mark be set upon those whom, it may be, history has condemned unrighteously? Let us not be more uncharitable than the painter or the sculptor, but pass on without pausing to reflect—Desinit in piscem. ”

“ For we do not endeavour to assume or acquire any majestic state for these our discoveries, by the triumphs of confutation, the citing of antiquity, the usurpation of authority, or even the veil of obscurity, which would easily suggest themselves to one endeavouring to throw light upon his own name, rather than the minds of others. ”

“ If you set a value on finery look into that grave; behold the moldering body of my Betsy, who now says to Corruption, thou art my father, and to the worm, thou art my mother, and my sister. Look to the bloody and brainless head of her husband. ”

“ When, on the other hand, it is found that the medium has introduced false drapery or accessories, which has sometimes occurred, we are in the presence of the most odious and blasphemous crime which a human being can commit. ”

“ If I had a mind to dip into precedents in our own history, and in that of other states, I could undertake to point out more instances in which men of the greatest eloquence have been prejudicial, than all that can be brought of their having been serviceable, to their country. ”

“ These letters may be written by the prisoner in soot and water, illustrated by rude sketches in charcoal;—by nature’s nobleman, free to use his inheritance, in letters of gold, with the fair margin filled with exquisite miniatures;—to the true man each will have value, first, in proportion to the degree of its revelation as to the life of the human soul, second, in proportion to the perfection of form in which that revelation is expressed. ”

“ But grave persons and men of circumspection, pondering the circumstances of things fetched deep sighs from the bottom of their hearts, to see all strangers so much in request, and the subjects of the realm reputed as vile, which they took for a token of their irreparable ruin. ”

“ A second later he had smoothed out the paper and, carrying it to the light, strove to read the writing upon it. A whistle escaped him.
“An ‘I.O.U.,’” he exclaimed. “Devil take it, the signature’s undecipherable!” ”

“ When they die, their execrated name is blackened by the ink of a thousand pens, their reputation is torn to shreds; even their bones, pilloried by posterity, chastise them for their wicked lives. Let us then learn to be upright ”

“ It was hinted, by another, that an inscription, which had no relation to any particular set of men amongst us, but was composed many ages before the parties, which now divide the nation, had a being, could not be so properly conveyed to the world, by means of a paper dedicated to political debates. ”

“ We inherit constitutions, personal and political—we also inherit proverbs, which express so vividly and in so few words, the full-bodied and highly-crusted wisdom of former generations. Those proverbs expressed once—else they had not become proverbs—an almost universal contemporary opinion. Some of them are now beginning to wear thin, have of recent years been dying the death, and will presently be heard no more. ”

“ Here then is either a deficiency in the standard [Pg 16] narrative,—and this deficiency, as already observed, an inexcusable one,—or a redundancy in the subsequent account: a redundancy, the cause of which seems sufficiently obvious: a redundancy—in that account which, being premeditated on the part of the historian, is given by him as being premeditated on the part of the speaker, whom he represents as delivering it: a redundancy,—and that in a word a falsehood: a falsehood, and for what purpose?—for deception: the hero represented by his historian as using endeavours to deceive. ”