gains excel that of Shakspeare, Milton, Byron, Bacon, Locke, Scott, and Moore; your learning exceeds that of Bayle, and your science that of Newton. In patriotism you go beyond the heroes of ancient Rome, and you are the only person whose politics would bear to be analyzed by the most chymical scrutiny. Yet here you have shared the lot of humanity and have been the victim of calumny; as it is only a short time ago that your friends, the Whigs, accused you of anticipating Lord Durham's speech, and sending it to the Times. The world, however, did not attach the slightest credence to the accusation; yet, with unceasing fidelity, you, and you only, continue to believe the Whigs honest! Your domestic virtues, if possible, exceed your public ones; you are an exemplary husband, and such a father! and with a generosity truly unparalleled, take upon yourself all the blame of all the mischief done in my house. Generally speaking, Folly's cap and bells are to be found as often, if not oftener, on the hoary head of age, as on the Hyperian curls of youth; but you are an exception, for you are the only man whom "flattery fools not" or interest does not warp; ay, even the small paltry interest of a dinner, a speech, a paragraph in a newspaper, or a tabouret in a demoralized and demoralizing coterie. "Such divinity doth hedge" the vices of men, that no man cares to expose or interfere with those of another; the protecting laws for infamy which them selves have made, they must not, of course, infringe, for, as Claudian truly says, "Patere legem quam ipse tulisti, Incommune jubes siquid censes ve tenendum, Fit populus, nec fere vetat cùm viderit ipsum Therefore is it that whatever the injuries, outrages, and persecutions of we women may be, men invariably, whether from cowardice, coldness, craft, caution, self-interest, or selfishness, shrink from all interference in our legitimate ill-treatment; and, mark my words, dear sir, Sergeant Talfourd's Custody of Infants' Bill will never pass, for he is only likely to have your assistance, and with regard to our sex, men are members of nature's inquisition, whose profligacy can only flourish and be protected by keeping the instruments of torture in their own hands. As far back as 732, the cavalry of the Arabians, like that of their ancestors, the Parthians, was extremely formidable, and the Franks (not M. P.'s), whose armies were composed solely of infantry, found it difficult to resist the attacks of so versatile an enemy, or even to derive any permanent advantage from success. So it is with us women; our enemy is so versatile, consisting of law, science, and might, that we can only fight after the Parthian fashion, throw down our arrows, and fly; all our efforts for justice or redress must be unavailing, till, as a sex, we feel for and defend ourselves. Abstract and unorganized efforts never have and never will achieve a victory; to our individual struggles nren may still answer like the fox in the fable, when the cat boasted her superior skill: "Tu prétends être fort habile, En sais tu tant que moi? J'ai cents ruses au sac, And their one trick, worth one thousand, is power. Knowing, dear sir, that you are always more busy than any one else, I will not trespass longer on your valuable time than to assure you that I am, and ever shall be, Your devoted admirer And much obliged servant, CHEVELEY; OR, THE MAN OF HONOUR. CHAPTER I. "With all its sinful doings, I must say Or melodrama, which people flock to see, In vineyards copied from the south of France." BYRON. FOR such as believe that love is and ought to be omnipotent, the following " tale" can have but little attraction; and, on the other hand, to those, the unmercifully virtuous, who deem that to "feel tempted is to sin," and who, in their notions of the perfectable capacities of human nature, go beyond Pythagoras and Plato, it will have still less: for to them, the many-languaged voice of the passions is the unknown tongue of St. Paul, requiring interpretation; they are, indeed, “righteous over much," yet wanting all "The fair humanities of old religion." Oh! how many uncanonized martyrs there are in every-day domestic life, hourly warring both with the flesh and the spirit (and literally taking up their cross daily); and this must ever be the case as long as men continue to enforce the laws of God grammatically, thereby assuming a wide difference between the masculine and feminine, which is nowhere to be found in the text! "C'est une triste métier que celle de femme," says the French proverb, and it says truly. In society, the worst-conducted women generally fare the best, because their provocations to misconduct are often most humanely and charitably allowed; while the really virtuous almost invariably find coolness and insensibility, or want of temptation, the only merits awarded to them. But it is in England alone that there is a dark and Jesuitical hypocrisy in the systematically unjust conduct of men towards women; and those gentlemen who write the most liberally and lachrymosely about the errors of female education, which tends to stultify their intellect, warp their judgment, weaken the moral tone of their natures, and in every way unfit them to be the friends and companions of men, are the very first practically to labour for this state of things, which they affect to deprecate. As most husbands appear to think, that if their wives have a second idea, the world cannot be large enough for them both, any more than two suns can shine in one hemisphere. But the manner of evincing this opinion is even more offensive than the opinion itself, as they never cease to "affiché" the veto that women have no right even to mental free will, and are as much surprised at their daring to express an opinion different to that they have been commanded to entertain, as if the ground on which they walked were suddenly to exclaim, "Don't trample on me so hardly!" Then come the ex parte judgments of how few things ought to annoy or please others, a matter perfectly impossible to be decided upon but by self; so true is the assertion of Epictetus, "that men are more tormented by the opinion of things than by the things themselves." To those who require in print the extremes of virtue and vice, which are not in human nature, I repeat that these volumes can have little attraction; but to such as are aware that our nature, like our fate, is of " a mingled yarn of good and evil," there may be something in them not wholly uninteresting. Heir to a marquisate and immense wealth, his father dying when he was little more than five years old, and his mother before he was twenty, Augustus Mowbray was the spoiled child of nature and fortune; consequently, at the age of eight-and-twenty (the period when this history commences), he had begun to consider mankind as divided into two great classes, the boring and the bored: the first being formed by those who |