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.

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 " 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,
And do not lie, if any man should ask thee
But how thou dost, or what o'clock 'tis now;
Be sure thou do not lie, make no excuse

For him that is most near thee; never let
The most officious falsehood 'scape thy tongue,
For they above (that are entirely Truth)

Will make the seed which thou hast sown of lies,
Yield miseries a thousand-fold

Upon thine head, as they have done on mine."

A TIME TO WEEP, AND A TIME TO LAUGH.
ECCLESIASTES. iii. 4.

As

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
Wearieth me, May Lilian."

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