knowing that the other is sometimes sick, than they used to be with suspecting they were always so. The physician is now no longer secretly sent for to one, when the other is known to be from home. The apothecary is at last allowed to walk boldly up the public staircase fearless of detection.

"These amiable persons have at length attained all that was wanting to their felicity, that of each believing the other to be well when they say they are so. They have found out that unreserved communication is the lawful commerce of conjugal affection, and that all concealment is contraband."

"Surely," said I, when Sir John had done speaking, "it is a false compliment to the objects of our affection, if, for the sake of sparing them a transient uneasiness, we rob them of the comfort to which they are entitled, of mitigating our sufferings by partaking it. All dissimulation is disloyal to love. Besides, it appears to me to be an introduction to wider evils, and I should fear, both for the woman I loved and for myself, that if once we allowed ourselves concealment in one point, where we thought the motive excused us, we might learn to adopt it in others, where the principle was more evidently wrong."

"Besides," replied Mr. Stanley, "it argues a lamentable ignorance of human life, to set out with an expectation of health without interruption, and of happiness without alloy. When young persons marry with the fairest prospects, they should never forget that infirmity is inseparably bound up with their very nature, and that in bearing one another's burdens, they fulfill one of the highest duties of the union."

CHAPTER XVIII.

After supper, when only the family party were present, the conversation turned on the unhappy effects of misguided passion. Mrs. Stanley lamented that novels, with a very few admirable exceptions, had done infinite mischief, by so completely establishing the omnipotence of love, that the young reader was almost systematically taught an unresisting submission to a feeling, because the feeling was commonly represented as irresistible.

"Young ladies," said Sir John, smiling, "in their blind submission to this imaginary omnipotence, are apt to be necessarians. When they fall in love, as it is so justly called, they then obey their fate; but in their stout opposition to prudence and duty, they most manfully exert their free will; so that they want nothing but knowledge absolute of the miseries attendant on an indiscreet attachment, completely to exemplify the occupation assigned by Milton to a class of beings to