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TO QUEEN MAB.
27

"for fashion's sake," but to teach those who approached them, they were not to be injured with impunity.

Mr. S. says the children of unfortunate marriages are "nursed in a systematic school of ill humour, violence, and falsehood." Allow this to be the case, though the whole are rarely combined, would it mend the matter, to nurse them in the school of their mother's injuries; to be brought up to consider one of the authors of their existence, as the destroyer of the other's peace? Or to nurse them in the school of hatred towards a step-father, whose harshness and injustice might implant the bitterest principles of revenge? Or, if taken from the mother, at the period of the separation, to be nursed in the school of contemptuous neglect, by a step-mother? Or, not to be nursed in any school, but left to gather what weeds they might chance to select, on the wild common of abandoned nature?

It is strange that in condemning hypocrisy, as a fruit of unhappy marriages, he should propose hyyocrisy as a means of perpetuating his ad libitum connexions. Yet so it is; for he says, "if this connexion were put upon a rational basis, each would be assured that habitual ill temper would terminate in separa-