'The leading features in the character of an amiable and good woman are mildness, complacency, and equanimity of temper. The man, if he be a provident and worthy husband, is immersed in a thousand cares: his mind is agitated, his memory loaded, and his body fatigued. He returns from the bustle of the world chagrined perhaps at disappointments, angry at indolent or perfidious people, and terrified lest his unavoidable connections with such people should make him appear to be 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 affliction, strewed thorns beneath my feet by day, and wound adders round my pillow by night. Absence itself cannot afford a cure. Yes, reconcile it to your conscience how you may, you have given my peace a mortal wound.