that sweet sleep which he owed yesterday. As a guilty spirit says of guilt, in one of Landor's fragments,

"It wakes me many mornings, many nights,

And fields of poppies could not quiet it."

Modern fiction abounds with examples to the purpose. There is Colonel Whyte Melville's remorseful woman of the world bidding her young friend good night, and meaning it all the more because her own good nights are dead and gone : "What would I give to yawn as honestly as you do, and to sleep sound once again, as I used to sleep when I was a girl!” There is Mr. Trollope's Lady Mason, so wistfully, so vainly longing for rest-to be able to lay aside the terrible fatigue of being ever on the watch. From the burden of that necessity she has never been free since her crime was first committed. "She had never known true rest. She had not once trusted herself to sleep without the feeling that her first waking thought would be one of horror, as the remembrance of her position. came upon her." As with the royal lady pictured by the laureate,

and with a cry she woke.

And all this trouble did not pass, but grew."

There is Donatello, in Hawthorne's "Transformation," succumbing to a stupor, which he mistakes for such drowsiness as he has known in his innocent past life. There is Albert Maurice, in "Mary of Burgundy," gazing on the Vert Gallant of Hannut as he lay in a deep, sweet sleep-so calm and tranquil, though within the walls of a prison, suffering from injuries, and exposed to constant danger; gazing with a sense of envy and regret, "which few, perhaps, can appreciate fully, who have not felt

the sharp tooth of remorse begin its sleepless gnawings on the heart. He would not have disturbed such slumbers for the world; and, withdrawing again with a noiseless step, he retired to his own chamber, and cast himself down upon his bed, to snatch, at least, that heated and disturbed sleep, which was all the repose that he was ever more to know on earth." To such as him can nothing bring back, in the hour and power of darkness, more than an embittered memory of times

"When that placid sleep came o'er him

Which he ne'er can know again."

An innocent comforter in a modern tragedy offers a disquieted spirit the assurance, as regards the object of his disquiet, that "twill away in sleep." But his answer is,

"No, no! I dare not sleep-for well I know

That then the knife will gleam, the blood will gush,

The form will stiffen!"

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 lightheartedness 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."

L'

ONCE DENIED, THRICE denied.

ST. MATTHEW xxvi, 69, sq.

IE 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.

Though it was afar off that Peter followed his Master to the high-priest's house, yet he did follow; and, we may be sure, with little thought, and still less intention, of denying Him even once. But as he sat by the fire and warmed himself, the

identification of him by a certain maid as certainly a disciple of Christ was boldly met by the affirmation, or negation, "Woman, I know Him not." The lie was uttered; the winged word of falsehood was on its way. And there an end, he perhaps hoped. But after a little while, another bystander recognised him, and asserted the damaging recognition, “Thou art also of them." Another denial was the consequence: "Man, I am not." An hour passed away, and Peter, in sullen misery and bewilderment, self-consciously an abject coward and confirmed liar, had to deny for the third time Him he had denied once and again. "Of a truth," affirmed another of the mixed company, "this fellow also was with Him; for he is a Galilean." And Peter said, "Man, I know not what thou sayest." And then the cock crew. And then the Lord turned and looked upon Peter. And at that look—so upbraidingly expressive, so pathetically recalling recent protestations of unfaltering allegiance, and the concurrent prediction of lapse and abandonment-what could Peter do, but with shame and confusion of face, and with a heart full to bursting, go out, and weep bitterly.

When he thought thereon, he wept: thought of the Master's look, that recalled to him the vehement assurance of loyalty met by the foretelling of his fall. Thought, too, of the graduation of his denials; a first involving a second, and the second exacting yet a third. The third was the cost of the first. He had not counted the cost then. He had to pay it now.

It was part of the prophet's burden of woes against the doomed city, that she had "wearied herself with lies." Easily uttered, they may multiply at a rate to trouble the teller of them, and weary him, if only with the necessity of inventing new ones to back the old. He must ever be devising fresh vouchers for his impaired and imperilled credit. He must continually be endorsing his forged notes, and forging fresh ones that will stand inspection. Fallacia alia aliam trudit. And this is weary work.

"En quel gouffre de soins et de perplexité

Nous jette une action faite sans equité."

And as with actions, so with words. The same speaker of the foregoing couplet utters elsewhere the lament,—

"Ma fourbe est découverte. Oh! que la vérité

Se peut cacher longtemps avec difficulté !”

So we read in Molière. And Corneille has a play (not original) entirely devoted to the illustration of this subject, showing qu'il faut bonne mémoire après qu'on a menti; the Menteur kar' çox, being one who entasse fourbe sur fourbe, and is constrained by the law of his nature, at least of habit, which is second nature, to be ever adding to the heap of lies to which he has committed himself. A Spanish proverb—and Le Menteur is from the Spanish-declares that "for an honest man half his wits is enough, while the whole are too little for a knave;" the ways, that is, as Archbishop Trench expounds the adage, of truth and uprightness are so simple and plain, that a little wit is abundantly sufficient for those who walk in them; whereas the ways of falsehood and fraud are so perplexed and tangled, that sooner or later all the wit of the cleverest rogue will not preserve him from being entangled therein a truth often and wonderfully confirmed in the lives of evil men.

Among the aphorisms of Dean Swift we read: "He who tells a lie is not sensible how great a task he undertakes; for he must be forced to invent twenty more to maintain that one."

It has been called the severe, but appropriate, punishment of historians who desert the paths of truth for those of paradox, to be compelled to defend the falsehood to which they have committed themselves against the ever-accumulating evidences of the truth. Mr. Robertson, of Brighton, feelingly sketches the case of one who, being unprepared and accosted suddenly, says hastily that which is irreconcileable with strict truth; then to substantiate and make it look probable, misrepresents or invents something else; and so has woven round himself a mesh which will entangle his conscience through many a weary day and many a sleepless night.* One burden laid on fault,

*The case of St. Peter was expressly within the preacher's view. "It is shocking, doubtless, to allow ourselves even to admit that this is