With merely superficial good manners, he was never certain whether the punctilious niceties observed toward him by the Spragues and Atterburys were not a species of studied satire.

Cada Mosto is exceedingly superficial in his account of the Rio Grande; and it even seems dubious if he ever saw or entered this river, as he appears to have mistaken the navigable channel between the main and the shoals of the Rio Grande for the river itself; which channel extends above 150 English miles, from the island of Bulam in the E.S.E. to the open sea in the W.N.W.

And some day, the observed of all observers in some bright hall of gaiety, he would pass her coldly by, with a cynical smile upon his lips, and she would grow pale and totter and fall into the arms of the bloated Silenus, for whose title she had bartered her purely superficial charms.

He never seems to have directly imitated any one, though some nonsense has been talked about his "forming a style;" but it is probable that he felt a closer affinity to those old scholars, with their elaborate and ornate language and their deep and solemn tone of sentiment, than to the brilliant but comparatively superficial writers of Queen Anne's time.

I know that, but the contention is utterly superficial.