ow the iniquity of human laws--the object of _her_
introduction is to show the absurdity of the institution of marriage.
This would never be tolerated in England. Again, a married woman is
presented to us--for the sympathy which with us attends a young couple
to the church-door, only begins in France after they have left it: as a
child she has been betrothed to a person of her own rank--at five or six
incurable idiocy takes possession of her proposed husband--but when she
is eighteen the marriage takes place--the husband is a mere child still;
for his intellect has continued stationary though his body has reached
maturity--a more revolting picture was never presented than that of the
condition of the idiot's wife--her horror of her husband--and of course
her passion for another. The most interesting scenes between the lovers
are constantly interrupted by the hideous representative of matrimony,
the grinning husband, who rears his slavering countenance from behind
the sofa, and impresses his unfortunate wife with a sacred awe for the
holy obligations of marriage.

Again, a dandy of fifty is presented to us, whose affection for his ward
has waited, of course, till she is wedded to another, to ripen into
love. He still continues her protector against the advances of others;
for jealousy is a good point of character in every one but the husband,
and there it is only ridiculous. The husband in this case is another
admirable specimen of the results of wedlock for life--he is a
chattering, shallow pretender--a political economist, prodigiously dull
and infinitely conceited--an exaggerated type of the Hume-Bowring
statesman--and, as is naturally to be expected, our sympathies are
awakened for the wretched wife, and we rejoice to see that her beauty
and talents, her fine mind and pure ideas, are appreciated by a dashing
young fellow, who outwits our original friend the dandy of fifty and the
philosophical depute; the whole leaving a pleasing impression on the
reader's mind from the conviction that the heroine is no longer
neglected.

From the similarity of these stories--and they are only taken at random
from a great number--it will be seen that the spirit of almost all of
them is the same. But when we go lower in the scale, and leave the class
of philosophic novels, we find their tales of life and manners still
more absurd in their total untrueness than the others were hateful in
their design. There is a novel just now appeari