her own infant child. A brutal father, when out of work, abuses his brutalised wife; and she beats their baby:

-In between the gaps

Of such irregular work he drank and slept,

And cursed his wife because, the pence being out,
She could not buy more drink. At which she turned
(The worm), and beat her baby in revenge

For her own broken heart. There's not a crime
But takes its proper change out still in crime,
If once wrung on the counter of this world;
Let sinners look to it.

ABOUT AN ALMOST WISH OF THOMAS

HOOD'S.

A Medley of Annotations.

It was at Coblentz, in 1835, that Thomas Hood, gazing wistfully on his wife and two children sleeping in the same room, felt that in that one "little chamber" was comprised his "universe of love," all that his God could give him or remove; and sleeping, all, in mimic death. And then and there the almost wish possessed him that together they might all, himself included, sleep the sleep that knows no waking, and so be at rest. For Hood was then a care-fraught and anxious, as well as ailing man; and in the sight of that almost perfect peace, he almost wished for them, one and all, the quite perfect peace, in which the cares of the world have ceased from troubling, and the weary are at rest.

Almost I wish that with one common sigh
We might resign all mundane care and strife,
And seek together that transcendent sky,
Where Father, Mother, Children, Husband, Wife,
Together pant in everlasting life.

The almost wish of this tender husband and father sprang from the like depth of human feeling whence is derived that most expressive line, in one of Shakspeare's sonnets

And weep to have what I most fear to lose.

Depressed by the loss of his father, quickly followed by that of an old friend, and despondent at the troubled aspect of public affairs, we find Luther uttering the aspiration, "All I pray is, that God will not let my poor wife and children survive me, for I know not what is to become of them." Talfourd, in his Spanish tragedy, makes Padilla, the noble Castilian, implore Gonsalvo not to take his innocent boy from him, to be corrupted by camp and court, but rather to doom father, mother, and child at once, to common durance and decay.

Must he learn

The lessons of your guard-room? Never! Take
His innocent life, and with it the two lives
That are sustain'd by his-or, if that grace
Exceed your mission, find some loathsome cell-

A narrow cell-there are but three of us—

Where we may waste together;-speak and bless me!

Most natural, and therefore most common, is the wish on the part of either partner in a happy wedlock, that the other of them twain may not be the first to go. Not uncommon, however, is the really less selfish wish that the other may not be the survivor, all for that other's own dear sake. Mr. Tennyson gives cordial simple expression to a wish

that is greatly more desirable than either alternative, when he makes his healthy, summer-hearted Miller say:

Yet fill my glass: give me one kiss:
My own sweet Alice, we must die.
There's somewhat in this world amiss
Shall be unriddled by-and-by.
There's somewhat flows to us in life,
But more is taken quite away.
Pray, Alice, pray, my darling wife,

That we may die the self-same day.

The instances are not few, writes Southey to an aged but newly-made widow, in which husband and wife have become so nearly, as it were, one life, that death has not divided them, one following the other so closely in sympathetic dissolution that one service has consigned them to the grave. "This euthanasy is the happiest that can be imagined; one would not exchange it for 'Enoch's translation' or 'Elijah's chariot.' But where there is, in the common lot of life, a separation, then, methinks, the same affection which has so long rendered self a secondary object, should make the survivor thankful that the bitterer portion has fallen to his or her part.”

Sir Lawrence Peel's sketch of the first Sir Robert Peel, that "model of a practical man-the great statesman all over, only employed in a humbler sphere”— includes this pleasant anecdote of the great statesman's grandparents in their last days: "Mr. Peel died first. He died in September, 1795, aged seventy-two. His widow survived him about nine months, dying in

the March of the ensuing year, aged seventy-three. She had wished to survive him. One evening near the close of their lives, as they were seated by their fireside, surrounded by some of their descendants, conversing with the calmness of age upon death, the old lady said to her husband, Robert, I hope I may live a few months after thee.' A wish so opposite to that which wives in story are made to express, surprised her hearers, but not her husband, who calmly asked her, 'Why?' as if guessing her thought. Robert,' she replied, 'thou hast always been a kind, good husband to me; thou hast been a man well thought of, and I should like to stay by thee to the last, and keep thee all right." An answer which, as Sir Lawrence observes, if it literally convey an undue sense of her own importance as a prop, was probably free from the leaven of self-conceit, and conceived in the true spirit of a woman's tender heart.

In one of Mrs. Piozzi's letters occurs the following reflection on an old friend's recent or impending widowhood: "Mrs. Lutwych will have the loss not only of a good husband and certain friend, but she will lose her greatest admirer too, which few people could boast of in conjugal life, besides herself and Alas! alas! but we must lose or be lost. Her death would have broken his heart."

me.

Just a week after Dr. Andrew Combe's return from America-given over by the doctors and himself-he suffered the loss of his eldest sister, Mrs. Young, who died in her seventieth year. "She had