This is the sort of immorality to which cultivated people are most exposed. It is dangerous to the well-being of a community because it destroys the sense of security on which the idea of the family is founded. If we are to leave our wives when their conversation ceases to be interesting, the foundations of the home will be unsafe. If they are to abandon, us when we are dull, to go away with some livelier and more talkative companion, can we ever hope to retain them permanently? There is another danger which must be looked fairly in the face. When the lives of men are refined beyond the real needs of their organization, Nature is very apt to bring about the most extraordinary reactions. Thus the most exquisitely delicate artists in literature and painting have frequently had reactions of incredible coarseness. Within the Châteaubriand of Atala there existed an obscene Châteaubriand that would burst forth occasionally in talk that no biographer could repeat. I have heard the same thing of the sentimental Lamartine. We know that Turner, dreamer of enchanted landscapes, took the pleasures of a sailor on the spree. A friend said to me of one of the most exquisite living geniuses: "You can have no conception of the coarseness of his tastes; he associates with the very lowest women, and enjoys their rough brutality." These cases only prove, what I have always willingly admitted, that the intellectual life is not free from certain dangers if we lead it too exclusively. Intellectual excesses, by the excitement which they communicate to the whole system, have a direct tendency to drive men into other excesses, and a too great refinement in one direction may produce degrading reactions in another. Still the cultivation of the mind, reasonably pursued, is, on the whole, decidedly favorable to morality; and we may easily understand that it should be so, when we remember that people have recourse to sensual indulgences simply from a desire for excitement, whilst intellectual pursuits supply excitement of a more innocent kind and in the utmost variety and abundance. If, instead of taking a few individual instances, you broadly observe whole classes, you will recognize the moral utility of culture. The most cultivated classes in our own country are also the most moral, and these classes have advanced in morality at the same time that they have advanced in culture. English gentlemen of the present day are superior to their forefathers whom Fielding described; they are better educated, and they read more; they are at the same time both more sober and more chaste.