anger; he had put an end to the wrong, when it came openly before him.
I had myself heard him say on many occasions, with patriarchal fervor,
"Woman, they are your children, and God made them. Show mercy to _them_,
as you expect it for yourself." But he must have been aware, that, for
any three instances of tyrannical usage that fell under his notice,
at least five hundred would escape it. That was the sting of the
case--that was its poisonous aggravation. But with a nature that sought
for peace before all things, in this very worst of its aggravations
was found a morbid cure--the effectual temptation to wilful blindness
and forgetfulness. The sting became the palliation of the wrong, and
the poison became its anodyne. For together with the five hundred
hidden wrongs, arose the necessity that they must be hidden. Could he
be pinned on, morning, noon, and night, to his wife's apron? And if
not, what else should he do by angry interferences at chance times
than add special vindictive impulses to those of general irritation
and dislike? Some truth there was in this, it cannot be denied:
innumerable cases arise, in which a man the most just is obliged, in
some imperfect sense, to connive at injustice; his chance experience
must convince him that injustice is continually going on; and yet, in
any attempt to intercept it or to check it, he is met and baffled by
the insuperable obstacles of household necessities. Dr. S. therefore
surrendered himself, as under a coercion that was none of _his_
creating, to a passive acquiescence and a blindness that soothed his
constitutional indolence; and he reconciled his feelings to a tyranny
which he tolerated, under some self-flattering idea of submitting with
resignation to a calamity that he suffered.

Some years after this, I read "Agamemnon" of Aeschylus; and then, in
the prophetic horror with which Cassandra surveys the regal abode in
Mycenae, destined to be the scene of murders so memorable through the