But the inquiry now arises, What shall be done with all the questions Dr. Johnson speaks of, which reason cannot decide, which elude investigation, and make logic ridiculous,--cases where something must be done, and where little can be said? Read Mrs. Ellis’s “Wives of England,” and you have one solution of the problem. The good women of England are there informed that there is to be no discussion, that everything in the _ménage_ is to follow the rule of the lord, and that the wife has but one hope, namely, that grace may be given him to know exactly what his own will is. “_L’état, c’est moi_,” is the lesson which every English husband learns of Mrs. Ellis, and we should judge from the pictures of English novels that this “awful right divine” is insisted on in detail in domestic life. Miss Edgeworth makes her magnificent General Clarendon talk about his “commands” to his accomplished and elegant wife; and he rings the parlor-bell with such an air, calls up and interrogates trembling servants with such awful majesty, and lays about him generally in so very military and tremendous a style, that we are not surprised that poor little Cecilia is frightened into lying, being half out of her wits in terror of so very martial a husband. During his hours of courtship he majestically informs her mother that he never could consent to receive as _his_ wife any woman who has had another attachment; and so the poor puss, like a naughty girl, conceals a little schoolgirl flirtation of bygone days, and thus gives rise to most agonizing and tragic scenes with her terrible lord, who petrifies her one morning by suddenly drawing the bed-curtains and flapping an old love-letter in her eyes, asking, in tones of suppressed thunder, “Cecilia, is this your writing?” The more modern female novelists of England give us representations of their view of the right divine no less stringent. In a very popular story, called “Agatha’s Husband,” the plot is as follows. A man marries a beautiful girl with a large fortune. Before the marriage, he discovers that his brother, who has been guardian of the estate, has fraudulently squandered the property, so that it can only be retrieved by the strictest economy. For the sake of getting her heroine into a situation to illustrate her moral, the authoress now makes her hero give a solemn promise not to divulge to his wife or to any human being the fraud by which she suffers.