From the night of the massacre of Glencoe, Glenlyon, as Macaulay tells us, was never again the man that he had been before that night. The form of his countenance was changed; and “in all places, at all hours, whether he waked or slept, Glencoe was for ever before him.” As with a distinguished foreigner of a later generation, _Depuis ce moment, point de sommeil, point de repos; il croyait toujours voir un glaive arrêté sur sa tête_. In such cases, the sleepers start from broken slumbers, as if starting back from the edge of a precipice; for,— “Their whole tranquillity of heart is gone; The peace wherewith till now they have been blest Hath taken its departure. In the breast Fast following thoughts and busy fancies throng; Their sleep itself is feverish, and possest With dreams that to the wakeful mind belong.” “Something like a stupid sleep oppresses me,” writes one of Henry Mackenzie’s characters; “last night I could not sleep. Where are now those luxurious slumbers, those wandering dreams of future happiness? Never shall I know them again.” Falkland avows to Caleb Williams, the involuntary master of his master’s fatal secret, that “from the hour the crime was committed” he has not had an hour’s peace: “I became changed from the happiest into the most miserable being that lives; sleep has fled from my eyes.” And Caleb Williams himself testifies in an after chapter, “The ease and light-heartedness of my youth were for ever gone. The voice of an irresistible necessity had commanded me to ‘sleep no more.’” They that do murder, says Roscoe’s Violenzia,— “Never sleep more, never more taste of peace, Quaff poison in their drink, see knives in the dark, And ever at their elbow horror walks, Shaking them like a palsy.” The bitter contrast—ah, for the change ’twixt now and then!—is forcibly worded by Bosola in the “Duchess of Malfi”:— “O sacred innocence, that sweetly sleeps On turtle’s feathers! whilst a guilty conscience Is a perspective that foreshows us hell.” _ONCE DENIED, THRICE DENIED._ ST. MATTHEW xxvi, 69, _sq._ Lie engenders lie. Once committed, the liar has to go on in his course of lying. It is the penalty of his transgression, or one of the penalties. To the habitual liar, bronzed and hardened in the custom, till custom becomes second nature, the penalty may seem no very terrible price to pay. To him, on the other hand, who, without deliberate intent, and against his innermost will, is overtaken with such a fault, the generative power of a first lie to beget others, the necessity of supporting the first by a second and a third, is a retribution keenly to be felt, while penitently owned to be most just.