But, Rigby, what did I for thee endure?”
A man as pious as Henry Fox was otherwise, has declared that he knew few things which so darken one’s views of the moral government of God, as the experience of baseness and treachery in persons who have won our confidence; that it tempts one to question the reality of human virtue, to suspect the hollowness of all appearance of truth and piety, whence there is but a step to calling in question the moral purpose for which we are placed on earth. Hawthorne somewhere intimates that the young and pure are not apt to find out how actually sin is in the world, until that miserable truth is brought home to them by the guiltiness of some trusted friend. “Trust ye not in a friend,”—but ah, the pity of it, for him who has to take up with these words of the Morasthite,—“A man’s enemies are the men of his own house.”—How many variations on this general theme might be played from Shakespeare’s plays! Sir Valentine, for instance, denouncing the falsity of that other, so-called, but so far mis-called, Gentleman of Verona:
... “Now I dare not say
I have one friend alive; thou wouldst disprove me.
Who should be trusted now, when one’s right hand
Is perjured to the bosom? Proteus,
I am sorry I must never trust thee more,
But count the world a stranger for thy sake.
The private wound is deepest: O time most curst!
’Mongst all foes that a friend should be the worst!”