Lacon: or, Many things in few words

Overview
Charles Caleb Colton’s Lacon: or, Many things in few words (1820) is a brisk, bestselling compendium of aphorisms and short essays that distills observations on human nature, morals, politics, religion, and letters into polished, quotable sentences. Written by an English cleric with a taste for paradox and a nose for cant, it stands in the tradition of Bacon and La Rochefoucauld while speaking to post-Napoleonic concerns about power, reform, and individual conduct. Its pages seeded many durable maxims, including the oft-cited “Imitation is the sincerest of flattery,” and helped fix Colton’s reputation as a sharp moralist of manners and motives.

Form and Style
The book is arranged as numbered entries that alternate between epigram and brief reflection. Colton favors antithesis, balanced clauses, and a lapidary diction meant to compress experience into portable rules of thumb. He relishes paradox without abandoning practical sense, tempering cynicism with a call to self-command, charity, and prudence. Classical tags and biblical echoes provide pedigree, but the voice is distinctly modern: urbane, skeptical of pretension, and alert to how private interest dresses itself in public virtue.

Human Nature and Character
Colton treats vanity, self-love, and habit as the prime motors of conduct. Many virtues, he suggests, are unconscious disguises for advantage, though this is less a counsel of despair than a prompt to clear-eyed self-knowledge. The difference between knowledge and wisdom recurs: learning collects facts; judgment sorts causes and proportions ends. Genius is celebrated, but patient industry and self-command decide more fates than flashes of inspiration. Reputation is a currency that others mint; character is minted within. Conversation is an ethical art: talk should enlighten rather than display, and listening often achieves more than wit. Anger is a confession of weakness; forgiveness exercises strength. He returns to the grooming of habit, arguing that daily disciplines accomplish what resolutions alone cannot.

Politics and Society
Writing in the long shadow of revolution and war, Colton warns against the intoxication of power and the credulity of crowds. Patronage and corruption deform talent; laws without morals are brittle; liberty without restraint is license. He distrusts violent cure-alls and prefers reform that considers the stubbornness of custom and the gravity of unintended effects. Statesmanship, in his view, must reckon with passions as well as principles, and the statesman who ignores interest and imagination is as blind as the cynic who denies virtue altogether.

Religion, Learning, and Wealth
A churchman without fanaticism, Colton defends Christianity chiefly as a moral curb and consolation, blaming superstition and enthusiasm for mischief done in its name. Humility, he argues, guards inquiry; time favors truth while prejudice resists it. On education he presses the union of books and experience, remarking that examinations can be formidable even to the best prepared, since the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest can answer. Commerce and wealth receive shrewd, unsentimental treatment: money enlarges means and tempts motives; economy is a virtue only when paired with generosity; debt is a chain that binds both mind and morals. He praises independence of spirit over display and measures prosperity by capacity for use, not the noise of possession.

Reception and Legacy
Lacon was widely read, reprinted, and excerpted in commonplace books throughout the nineteenth century. While later critics found its tone austere and its generalizations sweeping, the best of its sentences retain the sting and steadiness of well-tested maxims. Colton’s blend of worldly skepticism and moral exhortation maps the permanent tensions between interest and ideal, fashion and conscience, quick success and slow wisdom. As a handbook of compressed reflection, it remains a lively companion for readers who prefer their advice strong, dry, and served in small glasses.