If there were more than a half-truth in the significant lament of a very different man, "I should be a poet if only I knew the names of things," then, indeed, Samuel MacCann was equipped to make a mark in literature.

One grows weary of the perpetual half-truths of inveterate detraction.

"Vulgarity," he writes with a pithy half-truth, "is far worse than downright black guardism; for the latter comprehends wit, humour, and strong sense at times, while the former is a sad abortive attempt at all things, signifying nothing."

But when we have realized more adequately how hopelessly incompetent the multitude must necessarily be in the problems of specialists, we shall also see that it is only by inadequate and even sophistical reasoning that most of their intellectual difficulties can be allayed; that the full truth (and the half-truth is mostly a lie) would be Greek to them.

For a mind wholly unprepared, the full truth is often a light that blinds and darkness; whereas the tempered half-truth prepares the way for a fuller disclosure in due time, even as the law and the prophets prepared the way for the Gospel and Christ, or as the enigmas of faith school us to bear that light which now no man can gaze on and live.

As a collection of those memorable half-truths called aphorisms, the poem is admirable; as an attempt to unite new half-truths with old into a consistent scheme of life, it is fallacious.

That non-co-operation is negative is merely a half-truth.

A fallacy is dangerous because of the half-truth in it.

The great danger attending his theories is that they are generally half-truths,truth and falsehood blended.

These half-truths, or truths with false tails to them, produced a secret uneasiness in the conscience of this honest man, showing itself in a passionate irritation against the enemy, which grew more and more.

"I sicken, sir," he continued, "of this qualmish air of half-truth that I have breathed so long.

To counteract the half-truths of the opposite school, he wrote a tale of singular power and promise, The House with the Green Shutters.

George Fox, utterly ignoring the immense stress which Nature lays on established order and precedent, got hold of a half-truth which made him crazy, as half-truths are wont.

He repudiates, as a mere half-truth, and a relic of barbarism, the maxim, "There is no friendship in trade.

" The truth had failed and so had the half-truth.

Will it give you pleasure in after years to think of her life embitteredof his life embittered, too, by a piece of gossip, woven out of a tissue of half-truthsthat will damn heras half-truths do?" "You love her so much as this?"

"If one is guiltless one does not fear the truth," he muttered slowly, "nor does virtue fear a liebut a half-truth will damn even the innocent, Mrs. Hammond.

He had had no fear that his father would appreciate that he was getting half-truths, or, rather, truths prepared skillfully for paternal consumption; his flurry had come from a sense that he was himself not doing quite the manly, the courageous thing.

Full grown young men could be so beautiful to her artist's eyes, that years were required to realize that these splendid exteriors held more often than not, little more than strutting half-truths and athletic vanities.

That is the academic theory of "character-acting," and of course the half-truth of it is obvious.

He is, we think, continually paradoxical and reckless in his statements; and his book is more thickly strewn than almost any we know with half-truths, broad axioms which require much paring down to be of any use, but which are made by him to do duty for want of something stronger.

It is often said that poets have no biographies but their own works, but that is only a half-truth.

" It has been said that Japan won her late war with China by means of Murata guns and Krupp cannon; it has been said the victory was the work of a modern school system; but these are less than half-truths.

THOMAS PAINE Proverbs are said to be but half-truths, but 'give a dog a bad name and hang him' is a saying almost as veracious as it is felicitous; and to no one can it possibly be applied with greater force than to Thomas Paine, the rebellious staymaker, the bankrupt tobacconist, the amazing author of Common-sense, The Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason.

But this is only a half-truth as we shall see in a moment.