temerity; the calumny I met with, I justly incurred, from the appearance I had subjected myself to. When I parted from my husband, I would on no account see you--you went abroad; your caprice now brings you back; you judge it equitable, perhaps, to restore me to that world I relinquished on your account--but time has conquered my partiality, and, after my former experience in that state, I cannot help shuddering at a contract which nothing can dissolve but death. To me it is terrible to reflect, that it is a strangely unequal conflict, in which the man only ventures the loss of a few temporary pleasures, the woman the loss of liberty, and almost the privilege of opinion.--From the moment she's married she becomes the subject of an arbitrary lord; even her children, the mutual pledges of their affection, are absolutely in his power, and the law countenances him in the use of it--and a woman finds no redress for the indelicate abuses of an uncivil, a passionate, and avaricious, an inconstant, or even a drunken husband--from matrimonial decisions there is no appeal.'--Mr Villars said every thing to justify himself, adding, that the most candid mind will sometimes, under certain circumstances, deviate from itself; but it is the property _only_ of narrow minds to persist in prejudice against conviction.--As the quarrels between lovers are the renewal of love--these differences were soon settled, agreeable to their mutual wishes. Mr Burt testified great joy at the celebration of the nuptials of his grandson--That good man died the next day, without any complaint, with a smile of complacency on his venerable face. In an age where men of letters seem so regardless of morals--in an age where they have endeavoured to persuade mankind, with but too much success, that the virtues of the mind and of the heart are incompatible--let them cast their eyes on the character of Mr Burt--When they find so many virtues united in a man, whose understanding was both sublime and just--when they find a man of his penetration to have been a strictly moral man--they will then, perhaps, be convinced that vice is the natural effect of an imperfect understanding. FOOTNOTES: [1] See the Fifth Commandment. [2] Pliny recommends ridicule as an admirable weapon against vice. It is surely better here employed, than as Shaftesbury recommends it, for the test of truth. [3] _Tribuna_, a term applied to a building quite round, or such as consists of many sides and angles, as the famous room within the great Duke's gallery at Florence: sometimes it is applied for a building, whose area or plan is semicircular, as the section of a cupola. [4] The reason polite literature is more cultivated in Paris than London, is on account of the university libraries, and academies of the former.