Are there objects in mid-century England more complex than tears? Literary texts often display the capacity to fake tears, using this practice (as we have seen) to mark sinister characters. Virtuous characters in Tom Jones (1749) do shed “tender Tears,” but Blifil fakes them (wiping away non-existent tears, not producing false ones) and Mrs. Honour produces them at will: “[S]he found Sophia standing motionless, with the Tears trickling from her Eyes. Upon which [Mrs. Honour] immediately ordered a proper quantity of Tears into her own Eyes.” Nor is this practice evident only in novels. Refusing to be moved by speeches delivered “with weeping eyes,” Cromwell's enemies insist that “he hath teares at will, & can dispense with any Oath or Protestation without troubling his conscience.” A hundred years later the capacity to manipulate tears no longer signals such serious faults (oath-breaking, lack of conscience), but it remains a troubling phenomenon. When in 1779 Hester Thrale coaxed Sophy Streatfield to prove that “she had Tears at command,” Frances Burney watched Streatfield make “Tears come into her Eyes, & [roll] down her fine Cheeks” and then “ran away”: “When I saw real Tears, I was shocked.” Four months later Thrale demands a repeat performance (“Lord, she shall Cry again if you like it”) and Burney records that “two Crystal Tears came into the soft eyes of the S. S., – and rolled gently down her Cheeks! – such a sight I never saw before, nor could I have believed.… indeed, she was smiling all the Time.”