that the second person in the indictment is now everywhere called 'The
elderly shepherd';--but immediately after the bridal bells this husband
became sour and insupportable, and either she had the trick of putting
him publicly in the wrong, or he lost all shame in playing the churlish
domestic tyrant. The instances are incredible of a gentleman. Perry
Wilkinson gives us two or three; one on the authority of a personal
friend who witnessed the scene; at the Warwick whist-table, where the
fair Diana would let loose her silvery laugh in the intervals. She was
hardly out of her teens, and should have been dancing instead of fastened
to a table. A difference of fifteen years in the ages of the wedded pair
accounts poorly for the husband's conduct, however solemn a business the
game of whist. We read that he burst out at last, with bitter mimicry,
'yang--yang--yang!' and killed the bright laugh, shot it dead. She had
outraged the decorum of the square-table only while the cards were
making. Perhaps her too-dead ensuing silence, as of one striving to
bring back the throbs to a slain bird in her bosom, allowed the gap
between the wedded pair to be visible, for it was dated back to prophecy
as soon as the trumpet proclaimed it.

But a multiplication of similar instances, which can serve no other
purpose than that of an apology, is a miserable vindication of innocence.
The more we have of them the darker the inference. In delicate
situations the chatterer is noxious. Mrs. Warwick had numerous
apologists. Those trusting to her perfect rectitude were rarer. The
liberty she allowed herself in speech and action must have been trying to
her defenders in a land like ours; for here, and able to throw its shadow
on our giddy upper-circle, the rigour of the game of life, relaxed though
it may sometimes appear, would satisfy the staidest whist-player. She
did not wish it the reverse, even when claiming a space for laughter:
'the breath of her soul,' as she called it, and as it may be felt in the