Source identified1
Image design Charcoal
Read & copy
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive!”
Meaning & context
Scott’s narrator condenses Marmion’s worsening predicament into a warning that one deception tends to require further concealment and creates increasingly complex consequences.
Source details
Marmion, Canto VI, stanza XVII, Project Gutenberg #4010, transcribed from the 1888 Cassell & Company edition. “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive!” is the narrator’s moral comment as Marmion realizes that his own intrigue is closing around him. It remains narrative commentary inside Scott’s historical romance in verse rather than a standalone empirical rule.