he goes on to show, is that chain of entanglement which seems to drag down to fresh sins. "One step necessitates many others. One fault leads to another, and crime to crime. The soul gravitates downward beneath its burden. It was profound knowledge which prophetically refused to limit Peter's sin to once. 'Verily I say unto thee thou shalt deny me thrice."" Mr. Froude shows us Queen Elizabeth stooping to "a deliberate lie." At times, he says, writing of her embarrassed policy in 1565, she "seemed to struggle with her ignominy, but it was only to flounder deeper into distraction and dishonour." In October of that year she publicly denied that she had encouraged the rebellion in Scotland. In November, we read, "Never had Elizabeth been in greater danger; and the worst features of the peril were the creations of her own untruths." Again, in May, 1566: "Meanwhile Elizabeth was reaping a harvest of inconveniences for her exaggerated demonstrations of friendliness" to the Queen of Scots. Mary taking her at her word, "Vainly Elizabeth struggled to extricate herself from her dilemma; resentment was still pursuing her for her treachery in the past autumn. . . She could but shuffle and equivocate in a manner which had become too characteristic." She was but paying the price of lies-the being constrained to go on lying still. It is certain, affirms a popular essayist, that nobody yet ever did anything wrong in this world without having to tell one or more falsehoods to begin with the embryo murderer has to tell a lie about the pistol or dagger, the would-be suicide about the poison he purchases; and in fine, "the ways down which the bad ship : possible; yet no one knowing human nature from men and not from books, will deny that this might befall even a brave and true man. St. Peter was both; yet this was his history. In a crowd, suddenly, the question was put directly, 'This man also was with Jesus of Nazareth?' Then a prevarication-a lie: and yet another.”—Sermon on the Restoration of the Erring. * Froude, "History of Reign of Elizabeth,” vol. ii., pp. 126, 215, 226, 277, 278. U Wickedness slides to a shoreless ocean must be greased with lies." English reviewers not long since were prompt to recognise in Balzac's "La Marâtre," as revived to Parisian popularity, what they rightly accounted wonderful, a moral immaculate and beyond reproach. And what is that moral? "The necessity of a life of lying as a punishment for the one great lie of a mercenary marriage." One great lie is put out to interest, and the interest is compound. One great lie involves a ramification of others, great or small, if there be comparatives of magnitude in such matters; and memory, if not conscience, is for ever on the stretch. The sad expedient of renewed issues is a necessity. As with the involved victim in one of Crabbe's Tales: "Such is his pain, who, by his debt oppress'd, To another section, and with another starting-point from Holy Writ, may be referred some remaining illustrations of the subject. J' GENESIS xxvii. 19-24. ACOB in Esau's goodly raiment, and his smooth skin over laid with goatskins, was duly prepared for a consistent course of deception. But the lie upon lie he had to tell * Mr. Thackeray incidentally opposes the quasi-apologists for smuggling on the ground that it is a complicated tissue of lying. In his very last and unfinished work, he makes a good old rector allow that to run an anker of brandy may seem no monstrous crime; but when men engage in these lawless ventures, who knows how far the evil will go? "I buy ten kegs of brandy from a French fishing-boat, I land it under a lie on the coast, I send it inland ever so far, and all my consignees lie and swindle. it, and lie to the revenue officer. Under a lie (that is, a mutual secrecy), I sell it to the landlord of the Bell at Maidstone, say. landlord sells it to a customer under a lie. We are all engaged in crime, conspiracy, and falsehood; nay, if the revenue looks too closely after us, we out with our pistols, and to crime and conspiracy add murder. Do you ppose men engaged in lying every day will scruple about a false oath in a ness-box? Crime engenders crime, sir."-Denis Duval, chap. vii. ... I land My before his end was gained, must have sorely tried what of conscience he then had. The primary falsehood,-distinctly enounced in answer to his blind sire's "Who art thou?" "I am Esau, thy firstborn," come back from the chase with the venison Isaac had desired of his firstborn,-this initial lie had immediately to be backed by another. How had he found it so quickly? There is something revolting in the style of the unfaltering fabrication at once ready to hand, "Because the Lord thy God brought it to me." Then ensued that solution of the old man's misgivings by a manual examination of the disguised pretender; it was Esau's hirsute skin, sure enough, though the voice was Jacob's. But the blessing was given. And even after that eventful benediction, the patriarch, with a yet lingering apprehension, renewed the pointed question, in its directest form, "Art thou my very son Esau?" And Jacob said, "I am." Lie linked to lie, in a concatenation accordingly. Solent mendaces luere panas malefici, says Phædrus liars usually pay the penalty of their guilt. And Mrs. Browning vigorously states one distinctive penalty, where she speaks of those who- "Pay the price Of lies, by being constrained to lie on still." The author of "Romola" powerfully illustrates in that remarkable book the embarrassments involved in one cowardly departure from truth. In the chapter headed "Tito's Dilemma," the occasion arises for Tito to fabricate an ingenious lie; an occasion "which circumstance never fails to beget on tacit falsity." Many chapters farther on we find him experiencing the inexorable law of human souls, that we prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by the reiterated choice of good or evil that gradually determines character; and it becomes a question whether all the resources of lying will save him from being crushed by the consequences of his habitual choice. At another juncture we read: "Tito felt more and more confidence as he went on; the lie was not so difficult when it was once begun; and as the words fell easily from his lips, they gave him a sense of power such as men feel when they have begun a muscular feat successfully." The penalty is enforced a few pages later. "But he had borrowed from the terrible usurer Falsehood, and the loan had mounted and mounted with the years, till he belonged to the usurer, body and soul." Again: "To-night he had paid a heavier price than ever to make himself safe." * * From Sir Walter Scott we might gather numerous examples and aphorisms to the purpose. "It's a sair judgment on a man," says Ratcliffe, in the "Heart of Mid-Lothian," "when he has once gane sae far wrang as I hae dune"-the present thief-taker being in fact an ex-thief-that never a bit "he can be honest, try't whilk way he will." The career of Effie Deans, anon Lady Staunton, in the same story, is a practical sermon on the same text. "I drag on," she owns, "the life of a miserable impostor, indebted for the marks of regard I receive to a tissue of deceit and lies, which the slightest accident may unravel." Her sister, on perusing the letter which contains these confessions, is impressed with such an instance of the staggering condition of those who have risen to distinction by undue arts, and the outworks and bulwarks of fiction and falsehood, by which they are under the necessity of surrounding and defending their precarious advantages." Then again there is old Caleb Balderstone, querulous at being what he calls "forced" to imperil his soul" wi' telling ae lee after another faster than I can count them,' ,"-and elsewhere at the "cost" of "telling twenty daily lees to a wheen idle chaps and queans, and, what's waur, without gaining credence." And for another instance we have the titular Earl of Etherington, in "St. Ronan's Well," in the position as of a spider when he perceives that his deceitful web is threatened with danger, and sits balanced in the centre, watching every point, and uncertain which he may be called upon first to defend. "Such is one part, and not the slightest part, of the penance which never fails to wait on those, who, abandoning the 'fair play of the world,' endeavour to work out their purposes by a process of deception and intrigue." In one of Mr. Disraeli's earlier fictions, there is a young man whose frankness is proverbial, but who finds himself involved in a course of prevarication-due effect being given to its preliminary process, though "only the commencement of the system of degrading deception which awaited him." But perhaps the most direct and forcible illustration of the subject in modern fiction, is to be found in the "White Lies" of Mr. Charles Reade, a work the title of which declares its didactic scope. Rose Beaurepaire in an unguarded moment equivocates, or tells a white lie, and thereby hangs the tale. Soon we have her bitterly bewailing the imbroglio in which she has involved herself and others, and the necessity of fresh fibs to maintain the meaning and credit of the first. "There is no end to it," she sobs despairingly. "It is like a spider's web: every struggle to be free but multiplies the fine yet irresistible thread that seems to bind me." In the next chapter a significant paragraph intimates, "This was the last lie the poor entangled wretch had to tell that morning." And the penultimate chapter opens with a notice anew of the "fatal entanglement" into which In the American story of "The Gayworthys," the like moral attaches to the course of one unhappy woman who lets herself slide, half involuntarily, into deeper wrong: she holds her peace; she makes herself passive. "Her very soul lied to itself in its false, bewildered reasonings; that is the inherent retribution of false souls." There are some acts of folly, remarks the most popular, probably, of contemporary English penwomen, which carry falsehood and dissimulation at their heels as certainly as the shadows which follow us when we walk towards the evening sun; and we very rarely swerve from the severe boundary-line of right without being dragged ever so much farther than we calculated upon across the border. Corneille's celebrated play, "Le Menteur," but for reading which Moliére asserts his belief that he would never have written a comedy himself,-is "conveyed" from a Spanish original, and has itself been Englished by Fielding; the ingenuity of the piece consisting in the manner in which one lie is made to call for another, until their wholesale employer is inextricably caught in the toils. "This is the curse of every evil deed, That, propagating still, it brings forth evil," The laments the elder Piccolomini, in Schiller's trilogy. commission of one wrong, says Owen Feltham, puts a man upon a thousand wrongs, perhaps, to maintain that one injury, with injury is defended; and we commit a greater, to maintain a less. "A lie begets a lie, till generations succeed." Mr. Carlyle sternly moralises on the growth of accumulated falsities, -"sad opulence descending by inheritance, always at compound interest, and always largely increased by fresh acquirement on two high-minded sisters had been led, through yielding to a natural foible : the desire, namely, to hide everything painful from those they loved, even at the expense of truth. The author lays stress on the inextricable complications due to their "amiable dishonesty," and he importunes the reader to take notice that after the first White Lie or two, circumstances overpowered them, and drove them on against their will. It was no small part, he insists, of all their misery, that they longed to get back to truth and could not. |