indolent or perfidious himself. Is this a time for the wife of his
bosom, his dearest most intimate friend, to add to his vexations and
increase the fever of an overburthened mind, by a contumelious tongue
or a discontented brow? Business, in its most prosperous state, is
full of anxiety, labour, and turmoil. Oh! how dear to the memory of
man is that wife who clothes her face in smiles; who uses gentle
expressions, and who makes her lap soft to receive and hush his cares
to rest. There is not in all nature so fascinating an object as a
faithful, tender, and affectionate wife!'

Had he wished for a wife who, instead of indulging the caprice of
indolence would have awakened him to energy, and have taught him to
be just not captious, his desires would have been more rational:
but, to a man who had formed a system of obedience to authority, and
not to reason, the arguments he used were irrefragable. To a woman
who imagined that obedience, in all cases, was the badge of abject
slavery, they were absurd. Thus opposite in principle and in practice,
their unhappy state of existence finally became so intolerable, to one
of them at least, as to occasion the violent measure and the painful
sensations described by Mr. Elford in the following letter.

'TO MRS. ELFORD,

'The bitterness of unjust reproach, the invectives of an ungoverned
tongue, the rancorous accusations of a stubborn heart, these, wretched
as they long have made me, to me are now no more. Forgetful man! No
more? You I can forsake; but where shall I fly to rid myself of them?
You have riveted them upon me, and while I have life they can never
die. With you I have travelled through the vale of tears: you, like
misery personified, have held the cup of sorrow; have fed me with