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.