University of Virginia Library

1. OVID BOLUS, ESQ.,
ATTORNEY AT LAW AND SOLICITOR IN CHANCERY.
A Fragment.

And what history of that halcyon period, ranging from the
year of Grace, 1835, to 1837; that golden era, when shin-plasters
were the sole currency; when bank-bills were “as
thick as Autumn leaves in Vallambrosa,” and credit was a
franchise,—what history of those times would be complete,
that left out the name of Ovid Bolus? As well write the
biography of Prince Hal, and forbear all mention of Falstaff.
In law phrase, the thing would be a “deed without a
name,” and void; a most unpardonable casus omissus.

I cannot trace, for reasons the sequel suggests, the early
history, much less the birth-place, pedigree, and juvenile
associations of this worthy. Whence he or his forbears got
his name or how, I don't know: but for the fact that it is to
be inferred he got it in infancy, I should have thought he

borrowed it: he borrowed every thing else he ever had,
such things as he got under the credit system only excepted:
in deference, however, to the axiom, that there is
some exception to all general rules, I am willing to believe
that he got this much honestly, by bona fide gift or inheritance,
and without false pretence.

I have had a hard time of it in endeavoring to assign to
Bolus his leading vice: I have given up the task in despair;
but I have essayed to designate that one which gave him,
in the end, most celebrity. I am aware that it is invidious
to make comparisons, and to give pre-eminence to one
over other rival qualities and gifts, where all have high
claims to distinction: but, then, the stern justice of criticism,
in this case, requires a discrimination, which, to be
intelligible and definite, must be relative and comparative.
I, therefore, take the responsibility of saying, after due
reflection, that in my opinion, Bolus's reputation stood
higher for lying than for any thing else: and in thus assigning
pre-eminence to this poetic property, I do it without
any desire to derogate from other brilliant characteristies
belonging to the same general category, which have drawn
the wondering notice of the world.

Some men are liars from interest; not because they have
no regard for truth, but because they have less regard for it
than for gain: some are liars from vanity, because they would
rather be well thought of by others, than have reason for
thinking well of themselves: some are liars from a sort of
necessity, which overbears, by the weight of temptation, the

sense of virtue: some are enticed away by the beguilements
of pleasure, or seduced by evil example and education.
Bolus was none of these: he belonged to a higher department
of the fine arts, and to a higher class of professors of this
sort of Belles-Lettres. Bolus was a natural liar, just as
some horses are natural pacers, and some dogs natural setters.
What he did in that walk, was from the irresistible
promptings of instinct, and a disinterested love of art. His
genius and his performances were free from the vulgar alloy
of interest or temptation. Accordingly, he did not labor a
lie: he lied with a relish: he lied with a coming appetite,
growing with what it fed on: he lied from the delight of invention
and the charm of fictitious narrative. It is true he
applied his art to the practical purposes of life; but in so far
did he glory the more in it; just as an ingenious machinist
rejoices that his invention, while it has honored science, has
also supplied a common want.

Bolus's genius for lying was encyclopediacal: it was what
German criticism calls many-sided. It embraced all subjects
without distinction or partiality. It was equally good upon
all, “from grave to gay, from lively to severe.”

Bolus's lying came from his greatness of soul and his
comprehensiveness of mind. The truth was too small for
him. Fact was too dry and common-place for the fervor of
his genius. Besides, great as was his memory—for he even
remembered the outlines of his chief lies—his invention was
still larger. He had a great contempt for history and historians.
He thought them tame and timid cobblers; mere

tinkers on other people's wares,—simple parrots and magpies
of other men's sayings or doings; borrowers of and acknowledged
debtors for others' chattels, got without skill; they had
no separate estate in their ideas: they were bailers of goods,
which they did not pretend to hold by adverse title; buriers
of talents in napkins making no usury; barren and unprofitable
non-producers in the intellectual vineyard—nati consumere
fruges.

He adopted a fact occasionally to start with, but, like a
Sheffield razor and the crude ore, the workmanship, polish
and value were all his own: a Thibet shawl could as well be
credited to the insensate goat that grew the wool, as the author
of a fact Bolus honored with his artistical skill, could
claim to be the inventor of the story.

His experiments upon credulity, like charity, began at
home. He had long torn down the partition wall between
his imagination and his memory. He had long ceased to
distinguish between the impressions made upon his mind by
what came from it, and what came to it: all ideas were facts
to him.

Bolus's life was not a common man's life. His world
was not the hard, work-day world the groundlings live in:
he moved in a sphere of poetry: he lived amidst the ideal
and romantic. Not that he was not practical enough, when
he chose to be: by no means. He bought goods and chattels,
lands and tenements, like other men; but he got them
under a state of poetic illusion, and paid for them in an imaginary
way. Even the titles he gave were not of the earthy

sort—they were sometimes clouded. He gave notes, too,—
how well I know it!—like other men; he paid them like
himself.

How well he asserted the Spiritual over the Material!
How he delighted to turn an abstract idea into concrete cash
—to make a few blots of ink, representing a little thought,
turn out a labor-saving machine, and bring into his pocket
money which many days of hard exhausting labor would not
procure! What pious joy it gave him to see the days of
the good Samaritan return, and the hard hand of avarice relax
its grasp on land and negroes, pork and clothes, beneath
the soft speeches and kind promises of future rewards—
blending in the act the three cardinal virtues, Faith, Hope,
and Charity; while, in the result, the chief of these three
was Charity!

There was something sublime in the idea—this elevating
the spirit of man to its true and primeval dominion
over things of sense and grosser matter.

It is true, that in these practical romances, Bolus was
charged with a defective taste in repeating himself. The
justice of the charge must be, at least, partially acknowledged:
this I know from a client, to whom Ovid sold a tract of
land after having sold it twice before: I cannot say, though,
that his forgetting to mention this circumstance made any
difference, for Bolus originally had no title.

There was nothing narrow, sectarian, or sectional. in
Bolus's lying. It was on the contrary broad and catholic.
It had no respect to times or places. It was as wide, illimitable,

as elastic and variable as the air he spent in giving it
expression. It was a generous, gentlemanly, whole-souled
faculty. It was employed often on, and in behalf of, objects
and occasions of this sort, but no more and no more zealously
on these than on others of no profit to himself. He
was an Egotist, but a magnificent one: he was not a liar because
an egotist, but an egotist because a liar. He usually
made himself the hero of the romantic exploits and adventures
he narrated; but this was not so much to exalt himself,
as because it was more convenient to his art. He had
nothing malignant or invidious in his nature. If he exalted
himself, it was seldom or never to the disparagement of others,
unless, indeed, those others were merely imaginary persons,
or too far off to be hurt. He would as soon lie for
you as for himself. It was all the same, so there was something
doing in his line of business, except in those cases in
which his necessities required to be fed at your expense.

He did not confine himself to mere lingual lying: one
tongue was not enough for all the business he had on hand.
He acted lies as well. Indeed, sometimes his very silence
was a lie. He made nonentity fib for him, and performed
wondrous feats by a “masterly inactivity.”

The personnel of this distinguished Votary of the Muse,
was happily fitted to his art. He was strikingly handsome.
There was something in his air and bearing almost princely,
certainly quite distinguished. His manners were winning,
his address frank, cordial and flowing. He was built after
the model and structure of Bolingbroke in his youth, Ameri
canized

and Hcosierized a little by a “raising in,” and an
adaptation to, the Backwoods. He was fluent but choice of
diction, a little sonorous in the structure of his sentences to
give effect to a voice like an organ. His countenance was
open and engaging, usually sedate of expression, but capable
of any modifications at the shortest notice. Add to this his
intelligence, shrewdness, tact, humor, and that he was a ready
debater and elegant declaimer, and had the gift of bringing
out, to the fullest extent, his resources, and you may see that
Ovid, in a new country, was a man apt to make no mean impression.
He drew the loose population around him, as the
magnet draws iron filings. He was the man for the “boys,”
—then a numerous and influential class. His generous profusion
and free-handed manner impressed them as the bounty
of Cæsar the loafing commonalty of Rome: Bolus was no
niggard. He never higgled or chaffered about small things.
He was as free with his own money—if he ever had any of
his own—as with yours. If he never paid borrowed money,
he never asked payment of others. If you wished him to loan
you any, he would hand you a handful without counting it:
if you handed him any, you were losing time in counting it,
for you never saw any thing of it again: Shallow's funded
debt on Falstaff were as safe an investment: this would have
been an equal commerce, but, unfertunately for Bolus's friends,
the proportion between his disbursements and receipts was
something scant. Such a spendthrift never made a track
even in the flush times of 1836. It took as much to support
him as a first class steamboat. His bills at the groceries
were as long as John Q. Adams' Abolition petition, or, if
pasted together, would have matched the great Chartist memorial.
He would as soon treat a regiment or charter the
grocery for the day, as any other way; and after the crowd
had heartily drank—some of them “laying their souls in
soak,”—if he did not have the money convenient—as when
did he?—he would fumble in his pocket, mutter something
about nothing less than a $100 bill, and direct the score, with
a lordly familiarity, to be charged to his account.

Ovid had early possessed the faculty of ubiquity. He
had been born in more places than Homer. In an hour's discourse,
he would, with more than the speed of Ariel, travel
at every point of the compass, from Portland to San Antonio,
some famous adventure always occurring just as he “rounded
to,” or while stationary, though he did not remain longer
than to see it. He was present at every important debate
in the Senate at Washington, and had heard every popular
speaker on the hustings, at the bar and in the pulpit, in the
United States. He had been concerned in many important
causes with Grymes and against Mazereau in New Orleans,
and had borne no small share in the fierce forensic battles,
which, with singular luck, he and Grymes always won in the
courts of the Crescent City. And such frolics as they had
when they laid aside their heavy armor, after the heat and
burden of the day! Such gambling! A negro ante and
twenty on the call, was moderate playing. What lots of
“Ethiopian captives” and other plunder he raked down
vexed Arithmetic to count and credulity to believe; and, had

it not been for Bolus's generosity in giving “the boys” a
chance to win back by doubling off on the high hand, there
is no knowing what changes of owners would not have occurred
in the Rapides or on the German Coast.

The Florida war and the Texas Revolution, had each furnished
a brilliant theatre for Ovid's chivalrous emprise. Jack
Hays and he were great chums. Jack and he had many a
hearty laugh over the odd trick of Ovid, in lassoing a Camanche
Chief, while galloping a stolen horse bare-backed, up
the San Saba hills. But he had the rig on Jack again, when
he made him charge on a brood of about twenty Camanches,
who had got into a mot of timber in the prairies, and were
shooting their arrows from the covert, Ovid, with a six-barrelled
rifle, taking them on the wing as Jack rode in and
flushed them!

It was an affecting story and feelingly told, that of his
and Jim Bowie's rescuing an American girl from the Apaches,
and returning her to her parents in St. Louis; and it would
have been still more tender, had it not been for the unfortunate
necessity Bolus was under of shooting a brace of gay
lieutenants on the border, one frosty morning, before breakfast,
back of the fort, for taking unbecoming liberties with the
fair damosel, the spoil of his bow and spear.

But the girls Ovid courted, and the miraculous adventures
he had met with in love beggared by the comparison,
all the fortune of war had done for him. Old Nugent's
daughter, Sallie, was his narrowest escape. Sallie was accomplished
to the romantic extent of two ocean steamers, and

four blocks of buildings in Boston, separated only from immediate
“perception and pernancy,” by the contingency of
old Nugent's recovering from a confirmed dropsy, for which
he had been twice ineffectually tapped. The day was set—
the presents made— enperle of course—the guests invited:
the old Sea Captain insisted on Bolus's setting his negroes
free, and taking five thousand dollars apiece for the loss.
Bolus's love for the “peculiar institution” wouldn't stand it.
Rather than submit to such degradation, Ovid broke off the
match, and left Sallie broken-hearted; a disease from which
she did not recover until about six months afterwards, when
she ran off with the mate of her father's ship, the Sea Serpent,
in the Rio trade.

Gossip and personal anecdote were the especial subjects
of Ovid's elocution. He was intimate with all the notabilities
of the political circles. He was a privileged visitor of
the political green-room. He was admitted back into the
laboratory where the political thunder was manufactured, and
into the office where the magnetic wires were worked. He
knew the origin of every party question and movement, and
had a finger in every pie the party cooks of Tammany baked
for the body politic.

One thing in Ovid I can never forgive. This was his
coming it over poor Ben O. I don't object to it on the score
of the swindle. That was to have been expected. But swindling
Ben was degrading the dignity of the art. True, it illustrated
the universality of his science, but it lowered it to
a beggarly process of mean deception. There was no skill

in it. It was little better than crude larceny. A child could
have done it; it had as well been done to a child. It was
like catching a cow with a lariat, or setting a steel trap for a
pet pig. True, Bolus had nearly practised out of custom.
He had worn his art threadbare. Men, who could afford to
be cheated, had all been worked up or been scared away. Besides,
Ford couldn't be put off. He talked of money in a
most ominous connection with blood. The thing could be
settled by a bill of exchange. Ben's name was unfortunately
good—the amount some $1,600. Ben had a fine tract of
land in S—r. He has not got it now. Bolus only gave
Ben one wrench—that was enough. Ben never breathed
easy afterwards. All the V's and X's of ten years' hard
practice, went in that penful of ink. Fie! Bolus, Monroe
Edwards wouldn't have done that. He would sooner have
sunk down to the level of some honest calling for a living,
than have put his profession to so mean a shift. I can conceive
of but one extenuation; Bolus was on the lift for Texas,
and the desire was natural to qualify himself for citizenship.

The genius of Bolus, strong in its unassisted strength,
yet gleamed out more brilliantly under the genial influence
of “the rosy.” With boon companions and “reaming suats,”
it was worth while to hear him of a winter evening. He
could “gild the palpable and the familiar, with golden exhalations
of the dawn.” The most common-place objects became
dignified. There was a history to the commonest articles
about him: that book was given him by Mr. Van Buren

—the walking stick was a present from Gen. Jackson: the
thrice-watered Monongahela, just drawn from the grocery
hard by, was the last of a distillation of 1825, smuggled in
from Ireland, and presented to him by a friend in New Orleans,
on easy terms with the collector; the cigars, not too
fragrant, were of a box sent him by a schoolmate from Cuba,
in 1834—before he visited the Island. And talking of Cuba
—he had met with an adventure there, the impression of
which never could be effaced from his mind. He had gone,
at the instance of Don Carlos y Cubanos, (an intimate classmate
in a Kentucky Catholic College,) whose life he had
saved from a mob in Louisville, at the imminent risk of his
own. The Don had a sister of blooming sixteen, the least
of whose charms was two or three coffee plantations, some
hundreds of slaves, and a suitable garnish of doubloons, accumulated
during her minority, in the hands of her uncle and
guardian, the Captain General. All went well with the young
lovers—for such, of course, they were—until Bolus, with his
usual frank indiscretion, in a conversation with the Priest,
avowed himself a Protestant. Then came trouble. Every
effort was made to convert him; but Bolus's faith resisted
the eloquent tongue of the Priest, and the more eloquent eyes
of Donna Isabella. The brother pleaded the old friendship
—urged a seeming and formal conformity—the Captain General
urged the case like a politician—the Señorita like a warm
and devoted woman. All would not do. The Captain General
forbade his longer sojourn on the Island. Bolus took
leave of the fair Señorita: the parting interview held in the
orange bower, was affecting: Donna Isabella, with dishevelled
hair, threw herself at his feet; the tears streamed from her
eyes: in liquid tones, broken by grief, she implored him to
relent,—reminded him of her love, of her trust in him, and
of the consequences—now not much longer to be concealed—
of that love and trust; (“though I protest,” Bolus would
say, “I don't know what she meant exactly by that.”) “Gentlemen,”
Bolus continued, “I confess to the weakness—I wavered—but
then my eyes happened to fall on the breast-pin
with a lock of my mother's hair—I recovered my courage:
I shook her gently from me. I felt my last hold on earth
was loosened—my last hope of peace destroyed. Since that
hour, my life has been a burden. Yes, gentlemen, you see
before you a broken man—a martyr to his Religion. But,
away with these melancholy thoughts: boys, pass around the
jorum.” And wiping his eyes, he drowned the wasting sorrow
in a long draught of the poteen; and, being much refreshed,
was able to carry the burden on a little further,—
videlicet, to the next lie.

It must not be supposed that Bolus was destitute of the
tame virtue of prudence—or that this was confined to the
avoidance of the improvident habit of squandering his
money in paying old debts. He took reasonably good care
of his person. He avoided all unnecessary exposures,
chiefly from a patriotic sense, probably, of continuing his
good offices to his country. His recklessness was, for the
most part, lingual. To hear him talk, one might suppose
he held his carcass merely for a target to try guns and

knives upon; or that the business of his life was to draw
men up to ten paces or less, for sheer improvement in marksmanship.
Such exploits as he had gone through with,
dwarfed the heroes of romance to very pigmy and sneaking
proportions. Pistol at the Bridge when he bluffed at honest
Fluellen, might have envied the swash-buckler airs, Ovid
would sometimes put on. But I never could exactly identify
the place he had laid out for his burying-ground. Indeed,
I had occasion to know that he declined to understand
several not very ambiguous hints, upon which he
might, with as good a grace as Othello, have spoken, not to
mention one or two pressing invitations which his modesty
led him to refuse. I do not know that the base sense of
fear had any thing to do with these declinations: possibly
he might have thought he had done his share of fighting,
and did not wish to monopolize: or his principles forbade it
—I mean those which opposed his paying a debt: knowing
he could not cheat that inexorable creditor, Death, of his
claim, he did the next thing to it; which was to delay and
shirk payment as long as possible.

It remains to add a word of criticism on this great Ly
ric artist.

In lying, Bolus was not only a successful, but he was a
very able practitioner. Like every other eminent artist, he
brought all his faculties to bear upon his art. Though
quick of perception and prompt of invention, he did not
trust himself to the inspirations of his genius for improvising
a lie, when he could well premeditate one. He deliberately

built up the substantial masonry, relying upon the
occasion and its accessories, chiefly for embellishment and
collateral supports: as Burke excogitated the more solid
parts of his great speeches, and left unprepared only the illustrations
and fancy-work.

Bolus's manner was, like every truly great man's, his
own. It was excellent. He did not come blushing up to a
lie, as some otherwise very passable liars do, as if he were
making a mean compromise between his guilty passion or
morbid vanity, and a struggling conscience. Bolus had long
since settled all disputes with his conscience. He and it
were on very good terms—at least, if there was no affection
between the couple, there was no fuss in the family; or, if
there were any scenes or angry passages, they were reserved
for strict privacy and never got out. My own opinion is,
that he was as destitute of the article as an ostrich. Thus
he came to his work bravely, cheerfully and composedly.
The delights of composition, invention and narration, did
not fluster his style or agitate his delivery. He knew how,
in the tumult of passion, to assume the “temperance to give
it smoothness.” A lie never ran away with him, as it is apt
to do with young performers: he could always manage and
guide it; and to have seen him fairly mounted, would have
given you some idea of the polished elegance of D'Orsay,
and the superb menage of Murat. There is a tone and manner
of narration different from those used in delivering ideas
just conceived; just as there is a difference between the
sound of the voice in reading and in speaking. Bolus knew

this, and practised on it. When he was narrating, he put
the facts in order, and seemed to speak them out of his
memory; but not formally, or as if by rote. He would stop
himself to correct a date; recollect he was wrong—he was
that year at the White Sulphur or Saratoga, &c.: having
got the date right, the names of persons present would be
incorrect, &c.: and these he corrected in turn. A stranger
hearing him, would have feared the marring of a good story
by too fastidious a conscientiousness in the narrator.

His zeal in pursuit of a lie under difficulties, was remarkable.
The society around him—if such it could be
called—was hardly fitted, without some previous preparation,
for an immediate introduction to Almack's or the classic
precincts of Gore House. The manners of the nation
were rather plain than ornate, and candor rather than polish,
predominated in their conversation. Bolus had need of
some forbearance to withstand the interruptions and cross-examinations,
with which his revelations were sometimes received.
But he possessed this in a remarkable degree. I
recollect, on one occasion, when he was giving an account of
a providential escape he was signally favored with, (when
boarded by a pirate off the Isle of Pines, and he pleaded masonry,
and gave a sign he had got out of the Disclosures of
Morgan,) Tom Johnson interrupted him to say that he had
heard that before, (which was more than Bolus had ever
done.) B. immediately rejoined, that he had, he believed,
given him, Tom, a running sketch of the incident. “Rather,”
said Tom, “I think, a lying sketch.” Bolus scarcely

smiled, as he replied, that Tom was a wag, and couldn't help
turning the most serious things into jests; and went on with
his usual brilliancy, to finish the narrative. Bolus did not
overcrowd his canvas. His figures were never confused,
and the subordinates and accessories did not withdraw attention
from the main and substantive lie. He never squandered
his lies profusely: thinking, with the poet, that
“bounteous, not prodigal, is kind Nature's hand,” he kept
the golden mean between penuriousness and prodigality;
never stingy of his lies, he was not wasteful of them, but
was rather forehanded than pushed, or embarrassed, having,
usually, fictitious stock to be freshly put on 'change, when
he wished to “make a raise.” In most of his fables, he inculcated
but a single leading idea; but contrived to make
the several facts of the narrative fall in very gracefully with
the principal scheme.

The rock on which many promising young liars, who
might otherwise have risen to merited distinction, have split,
is vanity: this marplot vice betrays itself in the exultation
manifested on the occasion of a decided hit, an exultation
too inordinate for mere recital, and which betrays authorship;
and to betray authorship, in the present barbaric,
moral and intellectual condition of the world is fatal. True,
there seems to be some inconsistency here. Dickens and Bulwer
can do as much lying, for money too, as they choose, and
no one blame them, any more than they would blame a lawyer
regularly fee'd to do it; but let any man, gifted with the
same genius, try his hand at it, not deliberately and in writing,

but merely orally, and ugly names are given him, and
he is proscribed! Bolus heroically suppressed exultation
over the victories his lies achieved.

Alas! for the beautiful things of Earth, its flowers, its
sunsets—its lovely girls—its lies—brief and fleeting are
their date. Lying is a very delicate accomplishment. It
must be tenderly cared for, and jealousy guarded. It must
not be overworked. Bolus forgot this salutary caution.
The people found out his art. However dull the commons
are as to other matters, they get sharp enough after a while,
to whatever concerns their bread and butter. Bolus not
having confined his art to political matters, sounded, at last,
the depths, and explored the limits of popular credulity.
The denizens of this degenerate age, had not the disinterestedness
of Prince Hal, who “cared not how many fed at his
cost;” they got tired, at last, of promises to pay. The
credit system, common before as pump-water, adhering, like
the elective franchise to every voter, began to take the
worldly wisdom of Falstaff's mercer, and ask security; and
security liked something more substantial than plausible
promises. In this forlorn condition of the country, returning
to its savage state, and abandoning the refinements of a
ripe Anglo-Saxon civilization for the sordid safety of Mexican
or Chinese modes of traffic; deserting the sweet simplicity
of its ancient truthfulness and the poetic illusions of
Augustus Tomlinson, for the vulgar saws of poor Richard
—Bolus, with a sigh like that breathed out by his great prototype
after his apostrophe to London, gathered up, one

bright moonlight night, his articles of value, shook the dust
from his feet, and departed from a land unworthy of his
longer sojourn. With that delicate consideration for the feelings
of his friends, which, like the politeness of Charles II.,
never forsook him, he spared them the pain of a parting interview.
He left no greetings of kindness; no messages of
love: nor did he ask assurances of their lively remembrance.
It was quite unnecessary. In every house he had left an
autograph, in every ledger a souvenir. They will never forget
him. Their connection with him will be ever regarded
as

Poor Ben, whom he had honored with the last marks of
his confidence, can scarcely speak of him to this day, without
tears in his eyes. Far away towards the setting sun he
hied him, until, at last, with a hermit's disgust at the degradation
of the world, like Ignatius turned monk, he pitched
his tabernacle amidst the smiling prairies that sleep in vernal
beauty, in the shadow of the San Saba mountains. There
let his mighty genius rest. It has earned repose. We leave
Themistocles to his voluntary exile.