'DEPRESSED bodily by the fluid that damps every thing, I got intellectually elevated with MILTON, a little merry with SWIFT, or rather jolly with RABELAIS, whose Pantagruel, by the way, is quite equal to the best gruel with rum in it. So far can literature palliate or compensate for gastronomical privations. But there are other evils, great and small, in this world, which try the stomach less than the head, and the temper, and ill winds that blow with the pertinacity of monsoon. Of these, Providence has allotted me a full share; but still, paradoxical as it may sound, my burthen has been greatly lightened by a load of books. Many, many a dreary, weary hour have I got over; many a mental or bodily annoyance forgotten, by help of the tragedies and comedies of our dramatists and novelists! Many a trouble has been soothed by the still small voice of the moral philosopher; many a dragon-like care charmed to sleep by the sweet song of the poet! For all which I cry incessantly, not aloud, but in my heart. 'Thanks and honor to the glorious masters of the pen, and the great inventors of the press!'
ISN'T _Law_ a very curious thing, take it altogether? An adept in it must needs know all the precedents, all the legal discussions and litigations; must read innumerable volumes, filled with innumerable subtleties and cohesions, and written in an unintelligible jargon; must study rules by which a certain class of future events shall be judged, when those events can only be partially and imperfectly foreseen; a rule which never varies, while the cases never agree; a law which is general while the cases are individual; a law where the penalty is uniform, while the justice or injustice of the case is continually different. Who 'in view of these things' can wonder that the worse is often made to appear the better reason? Does not a lawyer triumph most, and acquire most fame, when he can gain a cause in the very teeth of the law he professes to support and revere? Who is the greatest lawyer? Not he who can most enlighten, but he who can most perplex and confound the understanding and embroil and mislead the intellect of judge and jury. We have before us a striking illustration of these remarks, in an unsettled case in the Court of Errors, on an appeal from a decree of the chancellor. A wife and mother, well stricken in years, leaves the bed and board of her husband, in consequence of long-continued ill treatment, and by 'her next friend' sues for alimony. Her husband, it appears in evidence, is an 'unclean beast' personally; moreover, he throws his tea-cup at her at the table; will not permit her to have a fire in the room in which she is ill, though it is in the depth of winter, but opens doors and windows to freeze her out; orders all the beds taken down, that she may not sleep; goes himself about the house at times _in puris naturalibus_; threatens to throw his wife into the well; when she is seated on a chair, pushes her out of it, and when she takes another, pushes her out of that also, and so forth. Now reader, it would amuse you to look over the 'Points on the part of the Apellant' in this case. By _his_ 'next friend,' the attorney, he complains that vice-chancellors are exceeding their credentials in assuming to be 'Chesterfieldian censors of the lesser morals.' He admits indeed that the husband was '_uncourteous_, in rudely throwing his tea-cup instead of handing it respectfully to the lady-in-waiting,' meaning the wife aforesaid; that he was guilty of '_impoliteness_, in capriciously commanding a change of chairs;' that he certainly did use 'an _inconsiderate expression_ concerning the well;' but that in driving his wife out of her sick room, by opening all the doors and windows on a cold winter-day, he was only 'enforcing wholesome exercise as a substitute for prejudicial inaction!' All these examples, let us add, are of the _lesser_ abuses and grievances which the unhappy woman suffered, year after year; yet the 'deeds without a name' are softened or defended with equal plausibility and ingenuity. The counsel for the appellant objects to the interference of the law-officers with such matters. 'Courts of chancery,' says he, with true Johnsonian grandiloquence, 'cannot, like ecclesiastical tribunals or inquisitions, regulate, by means of auricular confession and domiciliary visitation, connubial rights and duties! The chancellor's doctrine would perpetuate wordy wars and family feuds, and impart to conjugal caterwauling more than feline vitality!' But hold; we are 'interfering between man and wife,' an injudicious act, as 'tis said. * * * 'D.