But it has been well remarked of Socrates, that no American lady would live with him a year without applying for a divorce, and getting it, too, upon very sufficient grounds.

Seneca, who wrote so beautifully upon morals, was an adulterer; and, moreover, prostituted his pen to write a defense of a man who murdered his mother.

And Marcus Aurelius directed the murder of thousands of innocent men and women, causing young ladies to be stripped naked and torn to pieces by wild beasts, in the public amphitheater, and others to be roasted alive in red-hot iron chairs, for no other offense but that they avowed themselves Christians.

Such are these boasted saints and heroes of heathendom.
What, then, must the lives of the vulgar have been?
In the very height of Roman civilization, Trajan caused ten thousand men to hew each other to pieces for the amusement of the Roman people; and noble ladies feasted their eyes on the spectacle.

In the Augustan age, when the invincible armies of Rome gave law to half the world, fathers were in the habit of mutilating their sons rather than see them subjected to the slavery and terrible despotism of their officers.