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It is pleasant to consider the various forms of lying, because that study manifests the creative ingenuity of man and at the same time affords the diverting spectacle of the dupe. That kind of lying which, of the lesser sorts, has amused me most is the use of the footnote in modern history.

It began with no intention of lying at all. The first modest footnote was an occasional reinforcement of argument in the text. The writer could not break his narrative; he had said something unusual; he wanted his reader to accept it; and so he said, in little, "If you doubt this, look up my authority so and so." That was the age of innocence. Then came the serpent, or rather a whole brood of them.

The first big man I can find introducing the first considerable serpent is Gibbon. He still uses the footnote legitimately as the occasional reinforcement of a highly challengeable statement, but he also brings in new features.

I do not know if he is original in this. I should doubt it, for he had not an original mind, but was essentially a copier of the contemporary French writers and a pupil of Voltaire's. But, anyhow, Gibbon's is the first considerable work in which I find the beginnings of the earliest vices or corruptions of the footnote. The first of these is much the gravest, and I must confess no one has used it so well as Gibbon; he had genius here as in much else. It is, the use of the footnote to take in the plain man, the ordinary reader. Gibbon abounds in this use.