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''Twas to vindicate the character of her parents that Lady Byron wrote,--a holy purpose and devout, nor do I doubt sincere.

But filial affection and reverence, sacred as they are, may be blamelessly, nay, righteously, subordinate to conjugal duties, which die not with the dead, are extinguished not even by the sins of the dead, were they as foul as the grave's corruption.' Here is what John Stuart Mill calls the literature of slavery for woman, in length and breadth; and, that all women may understand the doctrine, the Shepherd now takes up his parable, and expounds the true position of the wife.

We render his Scotch into English:-- 'Not a few such widows do I know, whom brutal, profligate, and savage husbands have brought to the brink of the grave,--as good, as bright, as innocent as, and far more forgiving than, Lady Byron.

There they sit in their obscure, rarely-visited dwellings; for sympathy instructed by suffering knows well that the deepest and most hopeless misery is least given to complaint.' Then follows a pathetic picture of one such widow, trembling and fainting for hunger, obliged, on her way to the well for a can of water, her only drink, to sit down on a 'knowe' and say a prayer.
'Yet she's decently, yea, tidily dressed, poor creature! in sair worn widow's clothes, a single suit for Saturday and Sunday; her hair, untimely gray, is neatly braided under her crape cap; and sometimes, when all is still and solitary in the fields, and all labour has disappeared into the house, you may see her stealing by herself, or leading one wee orphan by the hand, with another at her breast, to the kirkyard, where the love of her youth and the husband of her prime is buried.
'Yet,' says the Shepherd, 'he was a brute, a ruffian, a monster.