Oh! and is it come to this? Then, as now, nothing so common as that such mischances of marriage, heard of by the world, and the rather if published by the sufferers or one of them, should be received only as excellent amusement for people round about. It is as if the one thing intrinsically and unceasingly comic in the world, for most people, were the fact that it consists of man and woman, as if the institution on which human society is built and by which the succession of earth's generations is maintained, were the one only subject, with most people, for nothing else than laughter. Even now perhaps our disposition to jocosity on this subject, not sufficiently entertained by incidents of our own day, will range back to that case of Milton and Mary Powell two hundred and twenty-eight years ago, and join in the gossip which it then began to circulate through the town. In the lobby of the House of Commons it must have been heard of: it may have given a relish to the street-talk of reverend Presbyterian gentlemen talking home together from the Assembly "Only a month or two married; his wife gone home again; and now, instead of proper reticence about what can't he helped, all this hullaballoo of a new doctrine about Divorce! Just like him!" This and such-like is what we seem to overhear; this and such-like is what Milton did overhear; not much more than this and such-like are most of us prepared to say even now when we read the story. And yet the story is surely worth more. One fails to see, after all, that it yields only matter for jest and the repetition of commonplaces. What are the facts? Two human beings, long dead and gone, but then alive and with the, expectation of many years of life before them, had hardly been banded together in church when they found, or thought they found, that their union was for their mutual misery. The one was a poor country-girl in her teens, ruing the fate to which she had committed herself, but with no weapons for her relief but her tears, her terror, and the mitigation of refuge in her father's house. _Her_ case is to be pitied; shame if it is _not_! The other was a man extraordinary--so extraordinary that even now we try to follow him in fancy in his walks through the London streets, and any bit of old wall his arm may have touched is a sacred antiquity, and we regard the series of thoughts that was in his mind through any month, or series of months, as something of prime interest in the spirit of the past, a prize that we would give gold to recover. Well, here was one series of thoughts that was in this man's mind for months and months, and that left effects, indeed, to his life's end. He was moody in his house; he walked moodily in the streets; we can hear him muttering to himself, we can see his teeth clenched. Morning and evening, day after day, he is in a great despair. And why? Because he has made the most fatal mistake a man can make, and is gazing on, morning and