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.”