such a painful conflict of obligations, a wise and good man must be governed by those which are the most imperious, and will, therefore, generously relinquish any consideration referable only to himself. Let him be careful, however, not to do this but in cases of real emergency, which, happily, seldom occur, and to guard his mind sedulously against the injury it may sustain by such violations of the native love of truth. I shall conclude this long note with the two following very interesting biographical facts. The husband of the celebrated Arria, Cæcinna Pactus, was very dangerously ill. Her son was also sick at the same time, and died. He was a youth of uncommon accomplishments, and fondly beloved by his parents. Arria prepared and conducted his funeral, in such a manner, that her husband remained entirely ignorant of the mournful event which occasioned that solemnity. Pactus often inquired with anxiety about his son, to whom she cheerfully replied, that he had slept well, and was better. But if her tears, too long restrained, were bursting forth, she instantly retired, to give vent to her grief, and when again composed, returned to Pactus with dry eyes and a placid countenance, quitting, as it were, all the tender feelings of the mother at the threshold of her husband’s chamber. Lady Russell’s only son, Wriothesley, Duke of Bedford, died of the small-pox, in May, 1711, in the 31st year of his age. To this affliction succeeded, in November, 1711, the loss of her daughter, the Duchess of Rutland. Lady Russell, after seeing her in the coffin, went to her other daughter, married to the Duke of Devonshire, from whom it was necessary to conceal her grief, she being at that time in childbed likewise; therefore she assumed a cheerful air, and, with astonishing resolution, agreeable to truth, answered her anxious daughter’s inquiries with these words, ‘I have seen your sister out of bed to-day.’” The falsehood in the two cases related by the author is of the most egregious character, and yet they are fair representations of that kind of deception which many feel authorized to use in the sick room. The equivocation which is practised, it is true, is not always as gross and as labored, but it is as real. And whatever be the degree or kind of deception, the same principles will apply to every case. The question that presents itself is not, let it be understood, whether the truth shall in any case be _withheld_, but whether, in doing this, real falsehood is justifiable, in any form, whether direct or indirect, whether palpable or in the shape of equivocation.