ermettiez que la bruit de votre vie scandaleuse arrive jusqu'au fond de
ma province, et jette l'ombre d'une tache sur le nom honorable que je
vous ai donne--voila ce qui ne peut etre, voila ce qui ne sera pas."

So even the French novelists draw the line "somewhere," and in other
departments of morals they may be found drawing it closer than many good
uncharitable Christians among us would wish. In one very popular novel
the victim spends his wife's fortune at the gaming-table, leaves her to
starve, lives with another woman, and, having committed forgery, plots
with the Mephistopheles of the story to buy his own safety at the price
of his wife's honour. This might seem bad enough, but worse remains. It
is told in a smothered whisper, by the faithful domestic, to the
horrified family, that he has reason to suspect his master of having
indulged, once at least, if not oftener, in brandy-and-water!]

The habits of that age have passed away, and with them the drunken laird
and the widely tolerant wife. The advancing civilisation which has
nearly extinguished this class of frailties among those who have the
amplest means of indulgence in them, is, no doubt, doing for other
frailties, and will come at last to the one in hand, leaving it an
object of admiring and compassionate retrospect to an enlightened
posterity. There are people, however, too impatient to wait for such
results from the mellowing influence of progressive civilisation. Such a
consideration suggests to me that I may be treading on dangerous
ground--dangerous, I mean, to the frail but amiable class to whom my
exposition is devoted. Natural misgivings arise in one who professes to
call attention to a special type of human frailty, since the world is
full of people who will be prepared to deal with and cure it, provided
only that they are to have their own way with the disease and the
patient, and that they shall enjoy the simple privilege of locking him
up, dieting him, and taking possession of his worldly goods and
interests, as one who, by his irrational habits, or his outrages on the
laws of physiology, or the fitness of things, or some other neology, has
satisfactorily established his utter incapacity to take charge of his
own affairs. No! This is not a cruel age; the rack, the wheel, the boot,
the thumbikins, even the pillory and the stocks, have disappeared;
death-punishment is dwindling away; and if convicts have not their full
rations of cooked meat, or