keeping up appearances," to reckless expenditure at the moment when she feels the future to be hopelessly encumberedwith difficulties. In what respect are their agonies less than those of the terrified child compelled by its task-master to attitudinise on tight-rope or slack-wire, with a smile of grimace on its countenance? There, again, is the woman, compelled to support the man in some flagrant apostacy from his avowed principles; to give out the lies he has fabricated in excuse for some wretched recourse to expediency :—knowing the while, albeit by instinct, possibly, rather than by reflection,—that she is art and part in a profligate transaction. And all this, without the excitement of responsibility (don't stare at my phrase) to support her! Yet analyse the story as given by the world, of the Man of Letters in extremities; or of the Man in Office anxious to conceal possible downfall; or of the Man in Power bent on justifying some marvellously sudden harlequinade; and if the wife figures in it :-how perpetually will you find a part of the misadventure traced to her influence, or want of influence. How strongly will Reproof lift its voice against her thoughtlessness-how keenly society criticise the advocacy of one assumed, because of her recognised inferiority, to be unprincipled ! The one word of indulgent notice or kind construction bestowed on the secondary figure will be listened for in vain ; the idea of such a non-entity having proved struggles or trials worth counting be "ignored;" while the severe verdict is, as the mathematicians would put it," a constant quantity! Think, once again, how the companion of Greatness, without any tyranny prepense, or want of love, or withering neglect, may be stretched and strained, as it were, to the destruction past cure of all health, strength, and equilibrium! It is not hard for the companion of an ambitious man,-himself balanced by that proud humility which always accompanies the highest ambitions—to caricature his desire to rise, seeing that no such equipoise as his exists to keep even moderate hopes and purposes in check ;- -or for the flimsier thinker, who flutters in the train of the profound philosophical inquirer, to find herself stripped, bewildered, lost in a chaos from which she has no power to emerge;- -or for the Poet's wife to imagine that in his outward eccentricities lies his poetry, and therefore to out-do the same. From all this what rueful consequences proceed! Who has forgotten the clever simile, comparing the most celebrated of modern authors to a burning-glass through which the rays of the sun passed without destroying it, and his wife to the " bit of paper beside, which

would be presently in a blaze?"—but who has added, with the commonest and cheapest of charity, that the bit of paper thus placed could not, according to Nature's laws, help burning?

It is a safe and convenient manner, moreover, of wreaking envy, which cannot have escaped the cognizance of any one skilled in the subject, for those who feel Greatness itself to be beyond their detraction, to fasten on some one of its accessories. Venus could not be called imperfect; but then her noisy slippers! Ais past the power of depreciation to injure; but really Mrs. Candour "did expect something more from A- -'s wife!" Bhas written the book of the season: young damsels blush, and elder ones rise on tip-toe to see him come. Such a countenance! such a manner! such a gentleman of Nature's making!" To run down B- -'s book is to write yourself an ass. But, of the little woman "like dejected Pity" at his side... "Who was saying that he had married her out of a milliner's shop ?—and she looks like it." C- is damaged yet worse by his domestic circumstances. "He would come among us, poor fellow but that horrid woman keeps him at home. And no one can put up with her!" Let these charming, charitable verdicts come round to the ears of AB- or C; and who knows, but that in the friendly report of the same may lie the germ of one of those long domestic tragedies of dull misery, the end whereof is a desperate man breaking loose from a dogged woman: the one for every sympathetic soul to soothe; the other, an obstacle in every one's way; indefensible, unsightly, to be jostled out of sight, broken, and forgotten!

:

or

"Whither," says some impatient Hero-worshipper, "would you lead us, by this defence of the mean, the limited, the stupid? To the strengthening of the Great Man; to the supporting of him in "all due and becoming domestic amiabilities," (as a clerical friend of mine, who preached the most mellifluous of sermons and had not spoken a word to his wife for ten years, used to phrase it) to the encouragement of him-here all the ladies will bridle, and look applause, in a less random choice than his wont. Further, if any one fears that the Small Woman will give herself undue airs, and grow imperious upon the improved scale of mercy and notice awarded to her, let me gently remind him ;—that the days of improving intelligence by proscription, of raising the moral tone by vengeful punishment are past; and that without meaning to announce a Millennium in which Frailty and Folly shall reign,-still less the commencement of an Amazonian epoch when she-Bishops

shall make she-Puseyites shake in their copes and stoles, and sheforeign ministers settle boundary quarrels with Mrs. Jonathan's (not Rebecca's) daughters we must still insist upon a reconsideration of that code of popular praise and censure, which gives all the credit to the rich, and all the chastisement to the poor. Let those who are less shrill than Xantippe, less preternaturally submissive than Griselda, have their chance and their advocate; as well as the Dean Swifts who break the hearts of the Stellas for whom they journalise their thoughts, and the Burnses and the Byrons who have dedicated some of the most impassioned of their verses, to immortalise (as my shovel-hatted friend would say) their conjugal infidelities and infelicities!

In my next, peradventure, The Husbands of Great Women.

THE LAUGH OF RHADAMANTHUS.

RHADAMANTHUS sat on his iron throne,
Dooming each shuddering ghost,
For crimes in earthly harness done,
In his fiery vaults to roast..

A ghost came up to the judgment bar,
And stood for sentence there,

And the judge of hell glared sternly down,
As a great unpaid should glare..

"I know thee, fellow," the judge exclaimed,
"A pauper ghost art thou;

In the brightest isle old ocean girds,

Thou wert born to speed the plough.

"Hast ploughed and died? or, rebel soul!
Hast slaughtered rich men's game,
Or trespassed on their velvet lawns,
Or given their ricks to flame?

"Hast left behind unlawful brats,
The parish rates to swell?
Speak, pauper, that I may assign
Thy fitting place in hell.”

"Not so, my lord," the ghost replied,
"Felon nor vagrant I,

And three tall sons in wedlock born,
Might answer slander's lie;

"But that the first at Waterloo,
On two gashed Frenchmen died-
Their colours on his corpse were found,
Stanching his welling side.

"His brother, by a Burman shot,
Fell, on the forced stockade ;

The youngest, with his slaughtered troop,
In Affghan land is laid.

"The king" "Wilt answer for thyself?"
Quoth Rhadamanthus stern,
"Wherefore I should not send thee hence,
In Phlegethon to burn?

"Where was thy death?"-" Till seventy-five
I wheeled a roadstone barrow;
The Union gave my last poor meal,

And that was putrid marrow."

"Then thou dost murmur, slave, at faí,
Tremble, and hear thy doom !"

A sudden, calm, grim smile lit up
That spectre's face of gloom.

"The story of my life is told,

Save what no tongue can tellWhat has the slave of the lords of gold To fear from the lord of hell?

Then came a laugh-but such a laugh,
A shriek had been more gay-
It was the first that ever woke
Hell's echoes, as they say.

Could it have reached some Union walls,,
Or some grey feudal towers-

But these are thoughts for wiser heads :
They're no affairs of ours.

SHIRLEY BROOKS. .

CROWNER'S QUEST LAW IN UTOPIA.

WHILST the kingdom of Utopia was in its infancy, during the transition state of its constitution to the point of absolute perfection, its inhabitants were subject to certain legislative hardships. In particular, poverty was treated as a crime, even in cases where it arose from inability to get a living. The destitute, whether improvident or merely unfortunate, were shut up in workhouses,— where they were placed, indiscriminately, under the same rule of discipline; all being alike systematically made uncomfortable. They were put to the dirtiest drudgery; they were coarsely and scantily fed; their heads were cropped and shorn; and they were forced to wear a garb of ignominy. Man and wife were separated; no recreation was allowed; nor was any kind of solace permitted to these unfortunates. To fortify philosophy by a pinch of snuff, or to stifle hunger with a morsel of tobacco, was a high crime and misdemeanour.

The management of each of these penitentiaries for the poor was conducted by a local board of governors, called Guardians, who were controlled and superintended by certain bashaws termed Commissioners, whose head-quarters lay in a large house or palace situated in the Utopian metropolis. The chief office of these bashaws was to dictate the arrangements for the inconvenience of workhouse prisoners; and they were paid handsomely for taking this trouble.

Now, the Utopians, who were always a good-natured kind of people, did not fail, from the first institution of this system, to exclaim loudly against it as inconsistent with justice and humanity. They being, however, indisposed to riot and sedition, and their government never conceding anything to popular opinion, except under the fear of an absolute insurrection, their exclamations and outcries against the law relative to the poor were for a long time unavailing. At length, however, the overthrow of this barbarous code was effected in consequence of the event following :

A wretched woman, with an infant at the breast, driven by distress, sought and obtained admission into one of the workhouses. She was here placed upon the usual dietary, the skilly