tells us of his golden-legged Miss Kilmansegg, on the
penultimate page of her strange eventful history, that
"when she quench'd the taper's light,

Little she thought, as the smoke took flight,
That her day was done-and merged in a night
Of dreams and duration uncertain-

Or, along with her own,

That a Hand of Bone

Was closing mortality's curtain."

Shelley's Giacomo apostrophizes his unreplenished lamp, whose narrow fire is shaken by the wind, and on whose edge devouring darkness hovers:

"Thou small flame,

Which, as a dying pulse rises and falls,

Still flickerest up and down, how very soon,
Did I not feed thee, would'st thou fail and be
As thou hadst never been! So wastes and sinks
Even now, perhaps, the life that kindled mine :
But that no power can fill with vital oil
That broken lamp of flesh."

Othello must have been fresh in Shelley's remembrance when, later in the scene, the prelate Orsino exclaims, "See, the lamp is out," and, after some moralizing on Giacomo's part, asks to have it relighted:

"But light the lamp; let us not talk in the dark.
Giacomo (lighting the lamp).

And yet, once quench'd, I cannot thus relume
My father's life."

Quum semel occideris... non te restituet-but pietas is out of the question in the Cenci case, and genus too. The Caxtonian John Burley is mystical as well as moribund when he looks wistfully at the still flame of his candle, and says, "It lives ever in the air,"-meaning light. Extinguish the light? You cannot fool, it vanishes from your eye, but it is still in the space." He allows, however, that the breath of a babe can put out that light, in one sense, the common sense. And in that sense, what shall restore it? We read in the Palingenesis of a transatlantic bard, of the old belief

"that in the embers

Of all things their primordial form exists,

And cunning alchemists

Could re-create the rose with all its members

From its own ashes,"

though without the bloom, without the lost perfume. But ah! what wonder-working occult science can restore this little life, once rounded in a last long sleep? As the Duke muses, in Shirley's old play of The Traitor, with Amidea fainting before him,—

"The phoenix, with her wings, when she is dying,

Can fan her ashes into another life;

But when the breath, more sweet than all the spice
That helps the other's funeral, returns

To heaven, the world must be eternal loser."

Tears

The loss is, at least, irreparable, be it great or small. choked the utterance of Lewis the Sixteenth's counsel for the defence, when they, Malesherbes, De Sèze, and Tronchet, were called in to hear his doom, and urged the revocation of a decree passed by so slender a majority. "The laws may be repealed; but who shall recall a human life?" "Father of mercies !" exclaimed Coleridge, in one of his political essays, "if we pluck a wing from the back of a fly, not all the ministers and monarchs can restore it "how much less (if there were degrees in the impossible) one little life! Philip of Spain, in Schiller's Don Carlos, bewails the lost counsellor no power can restore :

"O that he might

But live again! I'd give my Indies for it.
Omnipotence! thou bring'st no comfort to me :
Thou canst not stretch thine arms into the grave,
To rectify one little act, committed

With hasty rashness, 'gainst the life of man.
The dead return no more."

Trust Charon for that. As Horace in London words it,

"To bear poor souls to Pluto's tribe,
One doit is Charon's modest gain.
Ten thousand pounds will never bribe
The rogue to row us back again!"

§ VIII.

A LOVING LIE ON DYING LIPS.

Othello, Act v., Sc. 2.

IN coupling together, as if possibly cohesive or compatible, the almost internecine words magnanimous and untruth, is there not a seeming paradox? (Yet to speak of seeming and paradox together is perhaps tautological:

Seems, madam? nay it is; I know not seems.") Can magnanimity be in any case predicated of a thing essentially so base as a lie? Can there ever be a tinge of redeeming dignity about an untruth? May one in any conceivable instance impute something of nobility to teller of untruths, or rather to a teller of some untruth, just once in the way? Can there be such a thing as a magnanimous liar,—that is, not a systematic and habitual liar, but a forger and utterer of a falsehood on this. occasion only?

one

Before too peremptorily rejecting the possibility, glance at the death-bed of murdered Desdemona. Her husband has strangled her, "O falsely, falsely murdered!" A guiltless death she dies. But her last words are framed She leaves the world with a lie

to acquit the murderer.

in her mouth: a generous one, a magnanimous one, if magnanimous a lie can be. To Emilia, bursting in affrighted and dismayed, and piteously demanding, “O, who hath done this deed?" comes from her expiring mistress the positive negation, call it sublime, call it (as the French would) adorable, or what else you will,

"Nobody; I MYSELF; farewell :

Commend me to my kind lord; O, farewell.

Oth. Why, how should she be murdered?

Emil.

Alas, who knows?

Oth. You heard her say herself, it was not I.

Emil. She said so; I must needs report the truth.
Oth. She's, like a liar, gone to burning hell;

'Twas I that killed her."

In the matter of the missing handkerchief, Desdemona

had faltered from the truth before the terrible eye of her husband; but here, in Professor Dowden's phrase, "she utters her dying and redeeming falsehood.” If she had deceived Brabantio, as in his anger he declares, and if in this matter of the handkerchief she had swerved from the truth, she now "atones for these unveracities;" not by acquisition of a confident candour,—such courageous dealing with difficulties is allowed to have been impossible for Desdemona,-but by one more falsehood, the "sacred lie which is murmured by her lips as they grow for ever silent."

The impassioned poetry, the dramatic intensity of Shakspeare, have had, again and again, their parallel passages in the homeliest prose of our police-court chronicles, when dying wives have with their last breath essayed to deliver from doom, and absolve from blame, the brute husbands by whom they have been done to death,— unconsciously emulating the magnanimity of self-accusing Desdemona's generous lie.

Splendide mendax. Womanhood has asserted its preeminence in this capacity, at sundry times and in divers manners. A living poet tells us that

"Men's truths are often lies, and women's lies

Often the setting of a truth most tender

In an unconscious poetry."

The tenderness is commonly undeniable, whatever we may think of the truth. Fiction is founded upon fact when it offers us a Frances Dagobert fibbing to her son by the week together, in pretending to have drunk part of the wine they both require, but of all of which she leaves for him; or Beatrice Morger's mother, keeping only a little, little piece of bread for herself, and saying that she had dined in the fields," God pardon her for the lie! and bless her, as I am sure He did; for, but for Him, no working man or woman could subsist upon such a wretched morsel as my dear mother took." "Heaven have mercy on me!" exclaims quite a different sort of transgressor of the absolute law of truth; "do lies told in charity, to save

another from misery, count like wicked, selfish, profitseeking deceptions?" If they do, this white liar confesses, or professes, to be deep in the angels' books.

Mr. Thackeray's Caroline, to save Philip Firmin from ruin, chose to forget her marriage to his father. The poor Little Sister protested to the astounded lawyer that, if the truth must be told, she-she knew it was no marriage— "never thought it was a marriage-not for good, you know." "And I'm ready to go before the Lord Chancellor to-morrow and say so."

Mr. Trollope's Kate Vavasor, being pushed violently by her brutal brother George, and falling to the ground, where he leaves her, has her arm broken. Her first thought is, how shall she mention the accident to him. when they meet anon? "Should she lie, and say that she had fallen as she came down the hill alone? Of course he would not believe her, but still some such excuse as that might make the matter easier for them all." A chapter later we come upon this suggestive bit of colloquy between her father and the doctor: "Is it not odd that such an accident should come from a fall whilst walking? asked Mr. Vavasor. The doctor shrugged his shoulders: "One can never say how anything may occur," said he. "I know a young woman who broke the os femoris by just kicking her cat ;—at least she said she did."

"Indeed! "Not

I suppose you didn't take any trouble to inquire?" much. My business was with the injury, not with the way she got it. Somebody did make the inquiry, but she stuck to her story, and nothing came of it."

Tasso's Sophronia magnanimously plays the liar to save a doomed people. She took the image, she tells the enraged prince; hers the fault, be it hers to pay the penalty:

"This spotless lamb thus offered up her blood

To save the rest of Christ's selected fold;

O noble lie! was ever truth so good?

Blest be the lips that such a leasing told!"

Tasso would have pleaded something more than poetical licence thus to speak,-in the teeth of the French philoso