It is under the infliction of such a concentration of misery that many a mind is shattered, and that death is courted as the only relief within its grasp. Othello, having discovered when it was too late that he had wrongly suspected Desdemona, and had sacrificed the life of the sweetest creature on earth, a combination of passions drives him to distraction, and under their influence he plunges the dagger into his heart. Jealousy was not, as some have supposed, the exclusive cause of Othello’s suicide. The following singular case attracted considerable notice fifteen years ago. A woman was subjected to much maltreatment by her husband. She was jealous of his attentions to one of the servants, and she had frequently declared, that if he persisted in insulting her under her own roof she would either cause his or her own death. On one occasion she was more than usually violent, and expressed her determination to ruin him. Fearful that she would carry her threat into execution, he had her placed in a room where there was no furniture, and nothing that she could use for the purpose of self-destruction. Her rage was greatly increased by this barbarous treatment, and her screams were sufficiently loud to alarm the whole neighbourhood. As her husband refused to release her from confinement, she determined no longer to submit to his brutal control, and resolved to commit suicide. Having no instrument that she could use, she felt some difficulty in effecting her purpose. She held her breath for some time, but that did not succeed. She then tried to strangle herself with her hands, but that mode was equally unsuccessful. Her determination was so resolutely fixed, that in desperation she tore her hair out by the roots. Still death did not come to her relief. In vain she searched in every corner of the room for something with which she might effectually take away her life. Just as she was beginning to give up the idea as hopeless, her eye caught a sight of the glass in the window; she instantly broke a pane, and with a piece of it endeavoured to cut her throat; and yet she could not succeed in effecting her horrid purpose. At last, as a dernier resort, she resolved to swallow a piece of the broken glass, hoping by this means to choke herself. She did so, and the glass stuck in her throat, and produced the most excruciating agony. Her groans became audible; the husband became alarmed, and opened the door, when he found his wife apparently in the last struggles of death. Medical relief was immediately obtained, and although everything that surgical ingenuity could suggest was had recourse to, she died, a melancholy spectacle of the effects of unsubdued passion. The two following cases shew how trifling a cause often incites to self-destruction:—