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 Molière 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,” laments the elder Piccolomini, in Schiller’s trilogy. The 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 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.