n:
if any member of a family conceives it his duty to sit continually in
the censor's chair, and weigh in the scales of justice all that happens
in the domestic commonwealth, domestic happiness is out of the question.
It is manly to extenuate and forgive, but a crabbed and censorious
spirit is contemptible.

There is much more misery thrown into the cup of life by domestic
unkindness than we might at first suppose. In thinking of the evils
endured by society from malevolent passions of individuals, we are apt
to enumerate only the more dreadful instances of crime: but what are
the few murders which unhappily pollute the soil of this Christian
land--what, we ask, is the suffering they occasion, what their
demoralizing tendency--when compared with the daily effusions of
ill-humour which sadden, may we not fear, many thousand homes? We
believe that an incalculably greater number are hurried to the grave
by habitual unkindness than by sudden violence; the slow poison of
churlishness and neglect, is of all poisons the most destructive. If
this is true, we want a new definition for the most flagrant of all
crimes: a definition which shall leave out the element of time, and call
these actions the same--equally hateful, equally diabolical, equally
censured by the righteous government of Heaven--which proceed from the
same motives, and lead to the same result, whether they be done in a
moment, or spread out through a series of years. Habitual unkindness is
demoralizing as well as cruel. Whenever it fails to break the heart,
it hardens it. To take a familiar illustration: a wife who is never
addressed by her husband in tones of kindness, must cease to love him
if she wishes to be happy. It is her only alternative. Thanks to the
nobility of our nature, she does not always take it. No; for years she
battles with cruelty, and still presses with affection the hand which
smites her, but it is fearfully at her own expense. Such endurance preys
upon her health, and hastens her exit to the asylum of the grave. If
this is to be avoided, she must learn to forget, what woman should never
be tempted to forget, the vows, the self-renunciating devotedness of
impassioned youth; she must learn to oppose indifference, to neglect
and repel him with a heart as cold as his own. But what a tragedy lies
involved in a career like this! We gaze on something infinitely more
terrible than murder; we see our nature abandoned to the mercy of
malignant pass