e Church of England, and those fancies were driven
into her imagination by her creed, her litanies, and her sermons. Eliza
Tyrrel was miserable; she was placed between her love, her duty, and her
religion. If she had been a woman of a strong mind, she would have
torn her creed into shreds, she would have dared the anathema of the
priest--the ostracism of its dupes--and would have clung to the man she
loved so truly, in defiance of that which was, at the best, but a faint
possibility.

The arguments in that pamphlet of Blount's were conclusive, but she
distrusted reason. The plainest dictates of common logic were referred
to the promptings of the Devil. How could it be otherwise? Can the
teachings of a lifetime be overthrown by the courtship of a few months?
Eliza Tyrrel, true to Blount, loved him; true to her religion, she durst
not marry him without the sanction of the Church. So Blount, as a last
resolve, laid the matter before the Lord's Vicegerent at Canterbury,
and many of the most learned divines of England; and from those
ecclesiastical leeches there was a Shylock cry of _incest, incest,
incest!_ And those terrible words came greeting the ears of Charles
Blount, making his home like a charnel-house, and they nearly sent his
beautiful Eliza to a maniac's grave. Still she lingered on. Denied the
power of a wife, she would not relinquish her duties as a mother to her
sister's babes. There was a calm heroism here which few can imitate.
The passions of Blount could not brook further insults. The last kick
of bigotry against the broken-hearted Freethinker was given. He could
no longer rise with the lark, and roam over the bills of his ancestral
home. To him the birds, as they warbled, spoke of joys never to return.
The broad river told him of the days when the little skiff floated
on its waters with Eleanora; and even his friends only too bitterly
reminded him of the tournaments of wit where Hobbes, Brown, and Gildon,
jousted each other in the presence of his wife. His life was one scene
of misery. He saw no chance of amendment. In a fit of despair, he
loaded his pistol with due deliberation, placed it to his head, and shot
himself. He lingered for sometime, and then died on the breast of Eliza.

This was a strange suicide. Blount's memory bears its weight of obloquy.
It is hard to draw the line when and where a man has a right to take
away his life. Common sense tells us that so long as our families are
dependent upo