We have no such asylums in which madness and fatuity receive every possible alleviation, while they are at the same time subjected to the continual restraint which their condition requires. They are wanted also for repentant sinners, who when they are awakened to a sense of their folly and their guilt, and their danger, would fain find a place of religious retirement, wherein they might pass the remainder of their days in preparing for death. Lord Goring, the most profligate man of his age, who by his profligacy, as much as by his frequent misconduct, rendered irreparable injury to the cause which he intended to serve, retired to Spain after the ruin of that cause, and there ended his days as a Dominican Friar. If there be any record of him in the Chronicles of the Order, the account ought to be curious at least, if not edifying. But it is rather (for his own sake) to be hoped than supposed that he did not hate and despise the follies and the frauds of the fraternity into which he had entered more heartily than the pomps and vanities of the world which he had left. On the other hand wherever convents are among the institutions of the land, not to speak of those poor creatures who are thrust into them against their will, or with only a mockery of freedom in the choice,—it must often happen that persons enter them in some fit of disappointment, or resentment, or grief, and find themselves when the first bitterness of passion is past, imprisoned for life by their own rash but irremediable act and deed. The woman, who when untoward circumstances have prevented her from marrying the man she loves, marries one for whom she has no affection, is more likely (poor as her chance is) to find contentment and perhaps happiness, than if for the same cause she had thrown herself into a nunnery. Yet this latter is the course to which if she were a Roman Catholic, her thoughts would perhaps preferably at first have turned, and to which they would probably be directed by her confessor. Men who are weary of the ways of the world, or disgusted with them, have more licence, as well as more resources than women. If they do not enter upon some dangerous path of duty, or commence wanderers, they may chuse for themselves an eccentric path, in which if their habits are not such as expose them to insult, or if their means are sufficient to secure them against it, they are not likely to be molested,—provided they have no relations whose interest it may be to apply for a statute of lunacy against them.