most flagrant of all crimes:  a definition which shall leave out the element of time, and call these actions the same—­equally hateful, equally diabolical, equally censured by the righteous government of Heaven—­which proceed from the same motives, and lead to the same result, whether they be done in a moment, or spread out through a series of years.  Habitual unkindness is demoralizing as well as cruel.  Whenever it fails to break the heart, it hardens it.  To take a familiar illustration:  a wife who is never addressed by her husband in tones of kindness, must cease to love him if she wishes to be happy.  It is her only alternative.  Thanks to the nobility of our nature, she does not always take it.  No; for years she battles with cruelty, and still presses with affection the hand which smites her, but it is fearfully at her own expense.  Such endurance preys upon her health, and hastens her exit to the asylum of the grave.  If this is to be avoided, she must learn to forget, what woman should never be tempted to forget, the vows, the self-renunciating devotedness of impassioned youth; she must learn to oppose indifference, to neglect and repel him with a heart as cold as his own.  But what a tragedy lies involved in a career like this!  We gaze on something infinitely more terrible than murder; we see our nature abandoned to the mercy of malignant passions, and the sacred susceptibilities which were intended to fertilize with the waters of charity the pathway of life, sending forth streams of bitterest gall.  A catalogue of such cases, faithfully compiled, would eclipse, in turpitude and horror, all the calendars of crime that have ever sickened the attention of the world.

The obligations of gentleness and kindness are extensive as the claims to manliness; these three qualities must go together.  There are some cases, however, in which such obligations are of special force.  Perhaps a precept here will be presented most appropriately under the guise of an example.  We have now before our mind’s eye a couple, whose marriage tie was, a few months since, severed by death.  The husband was a strong, hale, robust sort of a man, who probably never knew a day’s illness in the course of his life, and whose sympathy on behalf of weakness or suffering in others it was exceedingly difficult to evoke; while his partner was the very reverse, by constitution weak and ailing, but withal a woman of whom any man might and ought to have been proud.  Her elegant form, her fair transparent skin, the classical contour of her refined and expressive face, might have led a Canova to have selected her as a model of feminine beauty.  But alas! she was weak; she could not work like other women; her husband could not boast among his shopmates how much she contributed to the maintenance of the family, and how largely she could afford to dispense with the fruit of his labours.  Indeed, with a noble infant in her bosom, and the cares of a household resting entirely