pests upon the fire; but fortunately for the memory of my departed friend, the act that gave rise to the vile report I myself was a witness to. He merely took it up in his arms, threw it half way up to the drawing-room ceiling, and caught it, without injury, on its descent. The butler (who happened to be in the room at the time) called out, "Oh, Mr. Mytton, you'll kill the dog," and the lady screamed and cried; and on this was the dreadful charge founded. In the hilarity of high animal spirits, Mytton was much given to practical jokes, as all his friends know. Thus, on the same lady once accompanying him to the kennel, he shut the door upon her for an instant, after he himself had got outside of it, and this was magnified into his wishing, or, I believe, intending, that she might be devoured by his fox-hounds. Again - he threw her into deep water! Nonsense; he was never mad enough to do that. He merely, one very hot day, pushed her into the shallow of his lake at Halston, a little over her shoes. All this was, no doubt, wrong by a young lady who had been brought up so tenderly as Miss Jones had been reared, but with a hundred young ladies I could name, who had been differently treated in their childhood, nothing would have been thought of it, beyond a joke. And then we should look at the man. If, independently of his own imme

diate connexions, he had a greater regard for one person than for any other, I have reason to believe it was for his Halston chaplain, and he was two or three times nearly being the death of him-once absolutely confining him to his bed for several weeks, from the consequences of his having, by way of a "lark," knocked him over some iron railing at his hall door at Halston. Cruelty was not the property-no, not even the excrescence, of his nature; although, in his practical jokes, I admit he was rough, judging perhaps of other people's corporeal feelings by his own.1

I have said he was without excuse for ill conduct to his second wife, and I must again say, why. Not merely is her beauty the weakest of her charms, and her disposition and temper most amiable, but all who knew her will join with me in saying, that if a wife had been selected for Mr. Mytton with a view of reclaiming him, and making him a domestic character and a kind husband, she might have been the woman fixed upon for the experiment. Like Terence's lover,

1 How many times have I overheard such remarks as the following, made on Mr. Mytton, by ladies, in my hearing, in distant parts of England-and indeed now and then nearer home. "Oh! he is a brute! He threw his wife's dog on the fire and burnt it alive! He tried to drown her, and wanted his hounds to eat her alive." Pshaw.

then, he should not only have sworn never to have forsaken, or unkindly treated her, forasmuch as she was the object of his choice, and had been with difficulty obtained; but there was that suitableness of temper (the "conveniunt mores" of the poet), which the one valued so highly, and the other had not, perhaps, met with before. In short, there was every prospect of happiness from this union, and for some years indeed it appeared to be realized; but whether it was that he once again nursed a vulture to feed on his own heart, or whether it was not in his nature to live comfortably for any length of time. with a woman, however suited to his taste, and however dear to his heart, is a question not to be resolved by man. He has, certainly, been exhibited as a pattern of ruffianism in his conduct towards this amiable lady, and as some detail of it has already been before the public, a repetition would be useless, as well as painful to the humanity of my readers. But here comes the paradox. He loved this woman to distraction; he would have given the apple of his eye for her at any time; he would have risked twenty lives to have gotten her back again, and obtained her forgiveness; he raved about her in his madness; and sent her his dying benediction! Were those brutal deeds, then, the deeds of the kind-hearted John Myttonkind to every living soul but the woman whom

he loved to distraction! Oh, no; they were the deeds of a man visited by the hand of the Almighty, afflicted with a distempered brain, a monomaniac beyond all doubt. Could he, then, like Scylla, have got an Act of Oblivion passed in his favour for this sad stain on his, otherwise, good name, he would perhaps have passed even an earthly tribunal. But how fortunate is it, O man!--and especially for you who may be the loudest to condemn him -that we have reason to hope there is more mercy in heaven than in this, often too reproachful world.

But is it possible, it will still be asked, that Mr. Mytton could have really loved either, or both of his amiable wives? Indeed, reader, he did, and, woman-like, despite of his conduct they both loved him. Neither did they reproach him. He could not complain with the noble

bard

"Though my many faults defac'd me,
Could no other arm be found,

Than the one which once embrac'd me,
To inflict a cureless wound?"

But he might have joined his brother exile in his plaintive song—

"All my faults-perhaps thou knowest,

All my madness-none can know;
All my hopes, wheree'er thou goest,
Wither-yet with thee they go."

And I speak from experience on these points. In the fatal illness of his first wife, I obeyed the call of friendship, and went to him at Clifton Hot Wells, where she died, and I can vouch for his sufferings on that occasion. Who that has ever seen him look upon her portrait at Halston, and speak of her afterwards, could doubt the truth of what I have asserted? And yet, could they both rise from their graves, and were he to meet her again in all her beauty, and with all her charms, as he had met her before on their bridal day, I would not answer for many years of domestic happiness—even with the experience of the past to boot. "What is passion," says my Uncle Toby, "but a wild beast?" and unless restrained by reason, or subdued by temperance, it is as furious and violent as the brute beast himself. We may throw a gem to a cock or a pearl to a swine, but each would be better pleased with much humbler fare sought for and selected to their wild taste and pleasure; and I need not apply the moral here. It has been shown beyond a doubt, that it was not in the power of woman—no, nor in the