such immensity of standing capital." One lie, says Owen, must be thatched with another, or it will soon rain through. Benvenuto Cellini records in his autobiography, the bitter experiences he endured in being tempted to lie to the duke, his patron, lest he should forfeit the favour of the duchess-he who 66 'was always a lover of truth and an enemy to falsehood, being then under a necessity of telling lies." "As I had begun to tell lies, I plunged deeper and deeper into the mire,"―till a very Slough of Despond it became to him. Fool that he was, exclaims Mr. Trollope, of one of his characters in "Framley Parsonage :" "A man can always do right, even though he has done wrong before. But the previous wrong adds so much difficulty to the path-a difficulty which increases in tremendous ratio, till a man at last is choked in his struggling, and is drowned beneath the waters." Mr. Thackeray sermonises to the same effect: "And so, my dear sir, seeing that after committing any infraction of the moral laws, you must tell lies in order to back yourself out of your scrape, let me ask you whether you had not better forego the crime, so as to avoid the unavoidable, and unpleasant, and daily-recurring necessity of the subsequent perjury?" And the cleverest character this master of social satire ever drew, confesses how it jarred on her to begin telling lies to a confiding, simple friend: "But that is the misfortune of beginning with this kind of forgery. When one fib becomes due as it were, you must forge another to take up the old acceptance; and so the stock of your lies in circulation inevitably multiplies, and the danger of detection increases every day.” Jeremy Taylor quaintly says of the devil in the ancient oracles, "When he was put to it at his oracles, and durst not tell a downright lie, and yet knew not what was truth, many times he was put to the most pitiful shifts, and trifling equivocations, and acts of knavery, which, when they were discovered, it made him much more contemptible and ridiculous than if he had said nothing or confessed his ignorance." A lie has been called a two-edged sword without a hilt, which is sure to slip and cut the hand that holds it. "After telling one lie, we are sure to tell another; and usually, after spinning a silly, very complicated, and disgusting web, which entangles and chokes us, we find out that if we had told the truth, it would have been much the easier and better plan." Lying is likened, again, to borrowing of money-lenders; for the credit which we get by it we have always to pay heavily for; and at last we find that the interest by far exceeds the principal, and we get so inextricably involved that we never fully recover. "He who tells a lie," says Pope, "is not sensible how great a task he undertakes; for he must be forced to invent twenty more to maintain that one." Johnson observes that nobody can live long without knowing that falsehoods of convenience or vanity are very lightly uttered, and when once uttered are sullenly supported. He reminds us that Boileau, who desired to be thought a rigorous and steady moralist, having told a petty lie to Lewis the Fourteenth, continued it afterwards by false dates, thinking himself obliged in honour to maintain what, when he said it, was so well received. Pope himself is taxed with similar mendacity by Mr. de Quincey, who charges him, on a certain literary question, with knowingly "preparing for himself a dire necessity of falsehood. Once launched upon such a course, he became pledged and committed to all the difficulties which it might impose. Desperate necessities would arise, from which nothing but desperate lying and hard swearing could extricate him." And at a subsequent stage in the facilis descensus he is described, rather imaginatively, as feeling, and groaning as he felt, that fresh falsehoods were in peremptory demand. "This comes of telling lies," is supposed to be his bitter reflection: "one lie makes a necessity for another." The Leucippus of Beaumont and Fletcher thus admonishes an intimate : "My sin, Ismenus, has wrought all this ill: And I beseech thee to be warned by me, 296 A TIME TO WEEP, AND A TIME TO LAUGH. For him that is most near thee; never let Will make the seed which thou hast sown of lies, Upon thine head, as they have done on mine." A TIME TO WEEP, AND A TIME TO LAUGH. S to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the sun,-for as Shakspeare words it, "How many things by season seasoned are to their right praise and true perfection!"—be sure that the Wise King includes laughter and weeping in the list. "A time to weep, and a time to laugh." Acquainted with grief, he had also been familiar with merriment. He had said in his heart, Go to, now, I will prove thee with mirth; but the result was that he said of laughter, It is mad; and of mirth, What doeth it ?-For all this, he freely recognises a time to laugh, so that one keep to the time. So much depends, here, on the due observance of times and seasons. It is with the frivolous habit of laughing out of season, and at all seasons, that the following notes are concerned. The laureate's is a good keynote to begin with: "Prythee weep, May Lilian ! Gaiety without eclipse So with Barry Cornwall and his Hermione : "Something thou dost want, O queen! (As the gold doth ask alloy,) Tears, amidst thy laughter seen, Pity,-mingling with the joy." : Such a conjunction as the courtier records of Cordelia in “King Lear"- sunshine and rain at once: "her smiles and tears were like a better day: those happy smiles that played on her ripe A TIME TO WEEP, AND A TIME TO LAUGH. 297 lip, seemed not to know what guests were in her eyes :" "in brief, sorrow would a be rarity most beloved, if all could so become it." Nothing, we often hear it said, is so tedious as uniformity; and under the bright sky of Italy one sometimes sighs for a cloud. "A gay writer, who," says Horace Walpole, "should only express satisfaction without variety, would soon be nauseous." Johnson's Papilius winds up his confession, in the "Rambler," with a whine on the melancholy necessity of supporting that character by study, which he gained by levity; having learned too late that gaiety must be recommended by higher qualities, and that mirth can never please long but as the efflorescence of a mind loved for its luxuriance, but esteemed for its usefulness. There must be fruitage as well as blossomy "efflorescence;" as Cowper is fain to enforce, when in the closing lines of the " Task," he records how he once, when called to dress a sofa with the flowers of verse, played awhile with that light task, obedient to the fair : "but soon, to please her more, Whom flowers alone I knew would little please, Let fall the unfinished wreath, and roved for fruit." Mark Mrs. Browning's picture of the Lady Geraldine : "In her utmost lightness there is truth—and often she speaks lightly- So with Lord Lytton's Helen Mainwaring, the sunny gladness of whose nature must have vent like a bird's, though he forbids us to fancy that that gladness speaks the levity which comes from the absence of thought: "it is rather from the depth of thought that it springs, as from the depth of a sea comes its music.' Well and wisely Molière's Cléonte exclaims, "Veux-tu de ces enjouements épanouis, de ces joies toujours ouvertes? et vois tu rien de plus impertinent que des femmes qui rient à tout propos?" Such a femme as the same author's Zerbinette, a self-convicted giggler in and out of season, yet whose confession may be twisted into an example the other way, when she says, "J'ai l'humeur enjouée, et sans cesse je ris: mais, tout en riant, je suis sérieuse sur de certains chapitres." Among the writings of M. de St. Evremond there is an essay on the Idea of a Woman that never was, nor ever will be found. Emilia he calls this all too perfect, impossible she. And amongst the foremost of Emilia's fine qualities he reckons the co-existence of seriousness au fond with vivacity of mien. "For we find that the gayest humour doth, at length, become tiresome; . . . the most effervescent liveliness either disgusts or wearies you." In the case of the celebrated Duchesse de Longueville, De Retz notices the exquisite effect of the sudden bursts of gaiety which would at times dispel her habitual but not inexpressive languor. Mdlle. de Scudéry, in her "Clélie," was painting a well-known, perhaps too well-known, contemporary in the person of Clarice, when, "parmi toute cette disposition qu'elle a pour la joie," she ascribes to this charmer, qui rit si aisément, a facile faculty of tear-shedding: elle sait pleurer, whenever occasion justifies weeping. As Lady Eastlake says, in her little treatise on Music, a change of key is the most powerful engine in the hands of a musician: we cannot bear the monotony of one key long, even the most joyful: "Gaiety without eclipse wearieth me, May Lilian." We long for "a mournful muse, soft pity to infuse." The Hon. Miss Byron takes the liberty of telling the sister of Sir Charles Grandison that "Your brother has hinted, Charlotte, that he loves you for your vivacity, and should still more, if you consulted time and occasion.' The affections are justly said to be more readily called into play by a mixture of mirth and melancholy; ours being a twofold life, the union of mortal with immortal, we covet happiness, yet turn back anon to the more majestic form of sorrow. There is a form of cheerfulness which, we are assured, nobody can stand : "Send me hence a thousand miles people ostentatiously and pretentiously cheerful being not unfrequently foolish people: their spirits of a brisk but thin quality |