perfection of frame, and maturity of mind, which disease or other obstacles and impediments to its progress occasion; and, as we may add also, any forced and unnatural acceleration of its pace. The acclivity from childhood to adolescence may be ascended too rapidly: the ascent itself is not without its perils and difficulties; it extends, indeed, over one of the most dangerous tracts of country which we have to pass in the course of our journey through life. Upon our safe conduct through it, the health of body and vigour of mind of all after life greatly depend. Through educational neglect, there may be hardy, but wild and worthless plants; and a hot-house cultivation may produce such as are only calculated for useless and idle show. There may be, in fact, an extreme cultivation of the mind, which shall tend eventually to incapacitate, rather than strengthen it, causing it to lose in sensitiveness more than it gains in power, prematurely exhausting those energies which are requisite in order to wage the battle of life successfully. During a requisite course of study, habits of abstraction of mind may be formed, which render persons, as members of society, useless, because isolated and unsocial; and which, removing them from the ordinary temptations of man's worldly condition, leave them but a more certain and easy prey to temptations from within.

There

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To the point last named, we shall recur hereafter. We shall proceed, at present, to the period of life's full and favourable maturity. is a remark made by M. Lallemand, respecting hymeneal excesses, which rather amuses us. He gives it as his opinion, founded upon observation, that such excesses are more frequently committed out of vanity, than from veritable impulses. This may be consonant with French, but we doubt much if it be consonant with English, nature. In the stead of vanity, we should place an inordinate desire to please, of too unselfish a character, to come under the appellation of vanity. But in secular, as in devotional matters, "perfect love casteth out fear;" and the juste milieu soon establishes itself. Excess proves its own cure. Persons of opposite sexes, who love each other, soon understand each other. want of such mutual good understanding implies a want of true attachment. The brain may indeed be peopled with erotic images, which may induce parties to trespass over the limits set by the physical wants of the system; but this is less likely to occur in married life, than during a random career of dissipation. Hence it is that marriage, founded on sincere mutual attachment, is the only condition for the adult of both sexes which is perfectly consonant with nature; in every other state of life, there are complications of adverse feelings, and it is much if there are not irregularities of one description or another; under any circumstances, there are perpetual contests. In athletic sports, in which married are matched against single men, the balance of advantages gained

is in favour of the former. More regularity and uniformity of life is, in the case of the former, to be presumed. We think, moreover, that settledness of mind (psychologically) must contribute to this physical superiority. There is an escape from the various distractions attendant upon a life of celibacy. Nature does not fail to reward those who act in obedience to her dictates, although her ability to reward it has its limits. Our situations are so diverse, our capabilities and appetences so boundless, that we must not expect in this life to command an assemblage of all the elements whose coalition is required to perfect our happiness. Most of our race have to learn to be content in the absence of many of them. In the attachments, which lead parties to the temple of Hymen, there is more of the psychological, and less of the merely physical, than is imagined, or that might be inferred from reading Lallemand's work. No such thing can reasonably be expected as the most perfect physical adaptation possible. It is quite among the inferior necessities of nature that it should be so. Such adaptation rather succeeds psychologically than pre-exists physically: we are not all flesh and blood, and nothing else. In married life, the mens divinior is not without opportunities of displaying itself. There are causes of solicitude arise, which render self-command needful; there are attacks of illness and indisposition; there is a certain period, during gestation, at which abortion occurs more frequently than at other periods, and at which, in many, if not in all cases, the control of erotic impulses is demanded. Many of those kindlier sentiments, which rank far higher in the scale of morality than these animal impulses, are called into requisition. There are none of the virtues which are not required, which are not practicable in married life, and for the practice of which occasions do not continually arise; and for the practice of them, unseen, unknown, not for display, not out of vanity. The most heroic actions of life are those of which no one knows anything, and which are not even suspected to be heroic by the actors of them. Though the mishaps alluded to occur most frequently from the tenth to the twelfth week, weakly female constitutions may, throughout the whole process of gestation and lactation, be taxed too much. At the period named especially, this circumstance should be borne in mind. Mishaps of this nature are, for transcendental as well as utilitarian reasons, much to be deprecated.

To sum up, first, some of those which we venture to characterize as transcendental. A thousand instances, general and special, might be cited, in exemplification of the privations which might have been sustained by our whole species, had many of its brightest ornaments perished immaturely nor can we surmise what privations we have sustained, and may now be sustaining, through mishaps of this kind, some of which, probably, would not have occurred, had due regard been paid to

certain of the laws of nature. Only suppose that the chronicles of such mishaps had included, under the ban of an untimely annihilation, those embryos which, attaining their full growth, would have matured into our Watts and Arkwrights, what changes in the condition of the whole civilized world might have been thus, for many generations, or indefinitely, deferred! How do we know, but that, through any one such mishap, a Shakespeare, a Sappho, a Newton, a Herschel, a Madame de Stael, a Miss Edgeworth, a Mrs. Somerville, a John Hunter, may be crushed in the germ? Setting aside this fear of the untimely demolition of Shakespeares and Sapphos, which is by no means chimerical, there is THE EVERLASTING SACREDNESS OF HUMAN LIFE, even in its earliest and most rudimental state of being. This is not sufficiently borne in mind in what may be termed the legislative enactments of men against women, in cases of illicit births. It is not right so to enforce chastity as to promote murder. Among the illegitimately born, we have, in comparatively modern annals, Fairfax, the translator of Tasso, the author of one of the most valuable additions to the literature of our country; and in Sacred Writ, Jephthah, one of the heaven-inspired heroes of ancient Israel. Thousands of other instances, both general and special, might be adduced. It is to single individuals, here and there, whom nature has extraordinarily gifted, or who have shown unusual assiduity in studying her laws, that society lies under its greatest obligations. Supposing M. Lallemand to have perished in embryo, the loss to science would have been not the less irreparable for being unknown. are seasons and circumstances, then, which require that the passions should be kept under due control. However, upon a large scale, all that happens may be said to be right, inasmuch as Providence permits it to happen; we, ourselves, unless this duty be fulfilled, are personally in the wrong. Duties, in order to be fulfilled, must be known: but it is to be feared that, as Sir John Falstaff said to the Lord Chief Justice, we labour less under "the disease of not listening," than "the malady of not marking." There are many things, commonly known, which are not sufficiently borne in mind, even by those to whom they are best known.

There

Besides the foregoing considerations, there are others, and these such as come more immediately home to us: mishaps of this nature sometimes terminate fatally to the mother; often lay the foundation of lifelong debility and suffering; seldom occur without causing some degree of injury to the constitution. There are also, during gestation, various disturbances of the system. There are concomitant inequalities of temper, which require to be humoured, not thwarted. There are sometimes paroxysms of cerebral excitement approaching to insanity, pending which, the most sane procedure is to let the storm blow by.

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siderate and ruffianly conduct on the part of the husband causes many of the miscarriages which take place among the lower classes. Children may be killed before they are born, without perishing immediately: they may be born at the due period, and live months, and perhaps years, and yet sink into an early grave through prenatal injuries. There is, however, an obverse to this assertion. It is where the domestic virtues display themselves in the midst of privations, and anxieties, and sufferings that they shine most conspicuously. They are like the snowdrops and crocuses, which unexpectedly peep up out of the frost-bound soil, to diversify the depth and dreariness of winter, and give us a cheerful foretaste of the coming spring. While among those whose whole existence is a toil and a martyrdom are to be witnessed proofs of daily self-denial, we meet, too frequently, among those who have all the conveniences of life at command, persons incapable of the small self-sacrifices which common humanity dictates. It is not perceived that acts of self-denial which promote the happiness of others, reflect back happiness upon ourselves. There are allowances also to be made by, as well as for, the gentler sex. Upon the whole, marriage, with all its alleged asperities, taking it as it is, rough and smooth, does not require to be looked at through the medium of a Claude Lorraine glass, but regarded in its true light, as less a matter of appetites gratified than of affections and attachments perpetuated, and requires no finery of rhetoric to deck it out.

We have wished to make it out that self-denial is Christianity carried out into practice; that it is the perfection of MORAL SANITY; that it conduces to, that it is, happiness. Of all deviations from this golden rule, Guilt and Insanity share between them the odium. To affairs of the heart and passions we have sought to apply this axiom, no less applicable to these than to all others. M. Lallemand's work is a remarkably faithful history of certain human instincts: it does not go beyond, nor profess to go beyond, this: it is in so far, therefore, ethically imperfect. There is another view of the question of abortion which we have not omitted to place before the reader out of forgetfulness, but because it does not at all alter the case. It may be said that, as a set-off against a like number of extinguished bards, patriots, sages, heroes, heroines, and savants, are among those who perish in embryo, some who would perhaps have lived to expiate heinous offences against society upon the scaffold. With this we have nothing to do; of this we are not constituted judges we are not enlightened as prophets with any inspired knowledge of individual human destinies; there is one thing of which we are well assured-the inalienable sacredness of human life. It is owing to our sense of this, so far as we possess it—and we possess it comparatively speaking in a high degree-that we have been saved from the

internecine carnage which has desolated many of the principal continental cities. The very cowardice of the disaffected among us does their hearts inexpressible credit; in a pure and good cause, Englishmen are always brave; it is only in a bad or doubtful cause that they are pusillanimous. The trammels of sound religious and moral education are not easily thrown off. To resume our subject, and before quitting it to enter more closely into some particulars hitherto slightly touched upon. The physical congenialities and discrepancies of connubial life form a most fertile theme for discussion: nor is it blameable, but on the contrary highly meritorious, to seek, upon this as upon every important subject, "to add to virtue knowledge." Congenialities, in some respects, may co-exist with discrepancies in others. Wherever science turns her calm and unimpassioned eye, she discerns much which, by the untutored in her mysteries, passes by unrecognised and unmarked. Not to adduce any abstruse and far-fetched example of this, let us be permitted to unfold a little family picture, sketched, not from imagination, but from real life. There is a mother, surrounded by a young family, sitting in a child's chair nursing her infant. What is observable in this? That she has a pelvis of much less than ordinary capacity. Her husband is just entering the room. You stay awhile. You are about to take your leave. Lay hold of his hat under pretence of mistaking it for your own, and attempt to put it on. You find it barely perches on the tip of your head. Had it been of a size so large as to have flapped on to your nose, in other words, had he not had a below-average sized head, she would, more probably than not, have died in her first accouchement. There is such a thing as Providence. It need not be said that no such thought as that of the size and configuration of her suitor's head ever entered into her mind during courtship. It will be seen also that there are circumstances under which sterility, in so far as life is of value, would be a fortunate incident. We perceive also in the foregoing sketch the occasional advantage, quantitatively speaking, of want of brains. We cannot expect in marriage the most perfect possible physical adaptation in this or in an erotic acceptation of the term. Where this is the case in the latter sense of the term, a marriage may, nevertheless, be without offspring. We may easily conceive how a man may wed perfect physical adaptability, all the talents, and yet have for his wife a Messalina or a Lucretia Borgia; or, on the other hand, all the virtues and graces, without the qualities which physically characterised the more beautiful and less precise of the goddesses of ancient fable. The wheels within wheels of human fate are complex and countless. We have said that nuptial happiness is more dependent on psychological, than on physical qualities. It is certain, however this happens, that incongeniality of taste upon matters of no moment whatever disposes persons to hate each