Nor would it be easy to overrate the subjective advantages of home-life. Health, happiness, and longevity have no more insidious foe than the canker-worm of vexation; and for the unavoidable disappointments of social life there is no more effective specific than the peace of a prosperous private homestead, soothing the mind with evidences of success in the growth of a promising orchard, in the increase and improvement of domestic animals, in the happiness of merry children and contented dependents. Xenophon, after proving the excitements of an adventurous life by land and sea, found a truer happiness in the solitude of his Arcadian hunting-lodge. Felix Sylla, Fortune’s most constant favorite, abandoned the throne of a mighty empire to enjoy the frugal fare of a small hill-farm. Voltaire, worn out by the trials of a fifty years’ life-and-death struggle against the rancor of bigots, recovered his health and his peace of mind amidst the pear-tree plantations of Villa Ferney. In the resources of medicine and scientific surgery the ancients were far behind even the half-civilized nations of modern times, but their children could enjoy their holidays on their own playground, their sleepers could breathe pure air, their worn-out laborers could retire to the peace of a private home; and they enjoyed a degree of health and vigor which our most progressive nations can hope to re-attain only after centuries of sanitary reform. C.—PERVERSION. The germ of the ignoble patience which submits to the miseries of modern tenement-life, and learns to prefer the fetor of a crowded slum-alley to the free air of the woods and fields, can be traced to the voluntary prison-life of the first Christian monasteries. With all the gregariousness of the African race, the very slaves of our American plantations preferred to avoid quarrels and constraint by building a separate cabin for the use of each family; but the ethics of the Galilean church recognized no privilege of personal rights; the sympathies of family-life were crushed out by the enforcement of celibacy; every symptom of self-assertion was denounced as a revolt against the duty of passive subordination; the very instincts of individuality were systematically suppressed to make each convert a whining, emasculated, self-despising, and world-renouncing “member of the church of Christ.” The mortification of the body being the chief object of monastic seclusion, the hygienic architecture of convent buildings was considered a matter of such absolute unimportance that many of the cells (dormitories) had no windows at all, but merely a door communicating with an ill-ventilated gallery, after the plan of our old-style prisons. Eight feet by ten, and eight high, were the usual dimensions of those man-pens; and that utter indifference to the physical health of the inmates was but rarely seconded by a view to the advantages of private meditation is proved by the circumstance that the