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SUICIDE OF TWO LOVERS, OR, A ROMANCE OF DRUNKENNESS.

PITY for misfortunes, must not blind us to the real nature of their causes, nor should a factitious interest be excited in favour of those whose only claim to sympathy is their weakness of resolve, and their slavery to idle habits. It argues a bad state of public taste, not less than of public morals, when the gloss of romance is attempted to be cast over actions which are directly destructive, not only of one's own character and life, but of the peace and life of others. The freaks of a drunkard, and the reckless obstinacy of a suicide, are too frequently placed in a false light-the former in being made to elicit mirth, the latter to excite a kind of admiration. The two are but varieties of insanity. In the following narrative of a melancholy event, the plain moral is not given at all-we are left to deplore the untimely death of two young persons, but we are not distinctly cautioned -the young who should read the account, are not warned against the cause which produced so awful a catastrophe. If there be any thing romantic about it, it is the romance of drunkenness, since it was an act performed by a young man under the inspiration of the genius of alcohol. The article, as given in the Leeds Mercury, runs thus:

"A great sensation has prevailed in the town of Ripon during the last few days, in consequence of the sudden disappearance of two young persons of the names of Andrew Roy and Elizabeth Meadley. It appears they were strongly attached to each other, and that their intimacy had existed for two years. On Thursday evening, the 18th, this young couple were present at, and took part in a dance at a public house, along with the girl's parents, and some other friends of the parties: they all left the inn about twelve o'clock. Roy accompanied his sweetheart home, and went into the house; he was rather intoxicated, and wished to remain there all night; the girl's father, who was also in liquor, objected, and urged him to go home. At this treatment, as well as from the disinclination of the young woman's friends to the match, he felt offended, and muttered something as he went away. Before he quitted the house he asked to speak to Elizabeth-"only for three minutes" privately; her father reluctantly yielded to the joint entreaties of Roy and his daughter, and allowed her to go to the door. She then went out with her bonnet; after waiting for some time for her return, her mother went in search of them, but in vain. Nothing was heard of the parties on Friday or Saturday; still it was hoped that they might have gone off for the purpose of being married. On Sunday morning, however, a leather case, containing two flutes, was found in the river Ure, close by the town; these flutes were known to have been in Roy's possession, and used by him on the Thursday evening. The most painful apprehensions now began to be felt, and their parents were a prey to the most distressing fears. The river was dragged on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday; hand-bills were distributed, and every inquiry set on foot by the magistrates, and by the police under their directions; but all were fruitless till the afternoon of Tuesday, at four o'clock, when the body of the young woman was found, entangled by her long hair in some wreck and sand, about three miles down the river, betwixt Ripon and Boroughbridge. The next morning (Wednesday) the body of Roy was found near to the spot where it is supposed they had gone into the river. A coroner's inquest sat upon the bodies, but no evidence, except the substance of what has already been related, was adduced to throw any light on this mysterious affair, and a verdict of "Found Drowned" was recorded. Roy, who was one of the band of the Yorkshire Hussars, was a fine looking man, about twenty-seven years of age, and by trade a cabinet-maker. The ill-fated young woman was about twenty-one,

very prepossessing in her appearance, and of unimpeachable character; she was a mantua-maker. Her fate has excited the deepest sympathy among all classes. The funerals took place on Wednesday evening, and were attended by thousands: and the feeling exhibited by the assembled crowd was creditable to their humanity. One grave received the remains of the two lovers. It is difficult to find even the shadow of a reason for this act of desperation."

There was, we think, no reason in the case; the cause is given in the very next sentence of the narrative, in which it is said,

"Roy was in liquor doubtless, and probably highly exasperated at the supposed unkind treatment of the girl's father, in urging him to go home; he had been drinking too, for the last three or four days, as it had been the annual feast at Ripon, so that he had scarcely known what he did."

Apart from the manner of her death, and the circumstances under which it took place, the event might rather be considered a fortunate one for the poor girl. Had she, in time, married this youth, his habits were such as to render it almost certain, that she would have been continually wounded by his addiction to the bottle. The tavern and the ale house, would soon come to be preferred to her society; and with the sensibility she possessed, she could only have lingered out a few years, and ultimately died broken hearted at the brutality of a drunken husband. That such would have been the course of things, was rendered too probable by his continued habits of dissipation, at a time when the possession of her hand depended upon his sobriety and steadiness; thus removing the cbjections on the part of her father -who, although he could get drunk himself, felt that such a thing was no recommendation to a young man's becoming his son-in-law. A correspondent of the Leeds Mercury, among other details, gives the following:

"I have known Roy from his childhood-his habits have been very irregular for some time, and his indolenee has been such as to occasion sharp rebukes from his own father; he was fond of music, and of a romantic turn-given to company, and of a high ungovernable temper which could not brook any opposition-his indolence and expensive habits kept him poor, and he seemed dissatisfied with himself, and with every thing about him."

Now, it must be very obvious to every person, after reading this sketch of the temperament and mental constitution of Roy, that if any one thing more than another was calculated to keep his mind unsettled, and bring him into violence of action on any slight provocation, it would be the use of intoxicating drinks. If moral temperance were to be hoped for in such a case, it could only be by avoiding physical intemperance-and with a person of such a disposition as Roy's, the only chance of such avoidance would be in entire abstinence from strong drink. His romantic turn and ungovernable temper, required no excitements from the gin shop or the ale house.

This young man is the representative of too many in the world, some of whom are called even promising youths. And have females then, no direct interest in the temperance reform? is it to them a matter of indifference, for mothers to see their daughters consigned to the arms of a drunkard? or for the youthful bride to discover, as she too often does, that the morn of her life is to be so soon obscured by the unkind treatment of a drunken husband, and the final ruin of all her worldly prospects and respectability, by his gradual loss of character and recklessness of the opinion of the good and the wise?

The CATECHISM OF HEALTH is for sale at the LITERARY ROOMS, 121 Chesnut street, and by all the principal Booksellers throughout the Union.

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Ar the risk of encountering the jests of some of our friends, both married and single, we, poor lone bachelor folks, must again, in the sincerity of our hearts admit, even though it be to our own condemnation, that Hufeland was perfectly correct when he enumerated a happy married state, as one of the means of preserving health and promoting longevity. We do not feel ourselves equal to the task of examining, as a question of political economy, into the propriety of early marriages; we leave that to Malthus and his opponents; but we do believe, that this sacred union thus early formed, will greatly contribute to the general serenity of the parties in after life. The mere egotist may be heard to say, that his time will be unduly taken up, and his attention absorbed by the cares of a family. But if system, and a freedom from numerous little petty vanities, be essential to success, the chances are in favour of the married man. His social relations are established on a well understood footing: the calls upon his time, for frivolous intercourse abroad, and the numerous interruptions to which he was subjected, as a bachelor, at home, in a great measure cease. The domestic engagements of one day, serve as the measure of another; and he can calculate with tolerable precision, on the period to be allotted to business and to study. When wearied by the daily struggle with his fellow men, in the road to wealth or professional distinction, the husband, while finding solace and repose at home, is also enabled to convert this period of rest into one of useful study and profitable reflection. In his family group, he is made fully aware of the relations which he has to sustain VOL. III.-13

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with the world at large, and of the responsibilities which he incurs, as well as the duties to be performed. After a fatiguing day's labour of body or of mind, and sometimes of both, he is not driven, as too often happens to the bachelor, into the society of the frivolous-happy if not the dissolute, to divert his attention; nor need his sensibilities, worn down by collision in the crowd, or rivals in the career of ambition, be roused by unnatural excitement, the contagion of folly, the intoxicating bowl, or the midnight revel. The single man, who should even disdain recourse to idle recreation, and should stand aloof from companions incapable of inspiring or of receiving his esteem-whose whole soul should be directed to the onward march for wealth, reputation, and honours, and who should exhaust in this channel the disposition to love and friendship, the softer emotions of sympathy and benevolence, will still but just escape misery. Happiness he knows not: he feels, and he must sometimes, like the unfortunate youthful poet,* exclaim, that he has lived "an unloved, solitary thing!" At times he may, perhaps, persuade himself, that affections silenced are dead; and that his long assumed coldness and reserve are but philosophical equanimity, and a protection against the world's idle curiosity and intrusive pity, for sorrows and disappointments which it would never have spontaneously either averted or soothed. But there are moments, in which he feels that he is exercising a constraint on himself; and although from long habit, he may believe that the armour of indifference sits easy on him, he cannot, after all, remain entirely insensible to the irksomeness of his condition. In brief, neither the fullness of happiness nor of health can be experienced, if the affections and sentiments are unduly constrained, or irregularly and unnaturally exercised; and when, it may be asked, can the feelings so fully and appropriately expand themselves as in the matrimonial state, and in the discharge of the various duties required of those who enter into it? It will, we apprehend, be found that the greater number of those distinguished men in the arts and sciences, and in the liberal professions, who had to struggle the most under the pressure of poverty and other adverse circumstances, were married in the early part of their career, and during or before the seasons of their greatest trials. Fewer unmanly concessions and sacrifices to principle, fewer examples of cowardly flight from the world by suicide, will be found among the married than the single, in the first eventful period, in which a man begins to play his part in the drama of life.

"That dependance on the other half, necessary in marriage," says Hufeland, "accustoms one continually to a dependance on the laws; regard for one's wife and children, obliges one to be regular and industrious: by his children a man is attached closely to the state, its interest and prosperity

*Kirke White.

by these means become his own; or, as Bacon expresses it, he who is married, and has children, has given pledges to the state; he is a true citizen and a real patriot. But what is still more, a foundation is here laid, not only for the happiness of the present generation, but for that of the future also; as it is the matrimonial union only that produces to the state good moral citizens, accustomed from their youth to regularity and observance of their duty. One must not imagine that the state itself can supply that formation of the manners and education which an all-wise nature hath connected with the hearts of a father and a mother. The state, alas, is a bad mother!"

Marriage, according to the same author whom we have just quoted, is the only means to regulate love, and to direct it to its proper object. It moderates and regulates enjoyment, and is especially promotive of domestic happiness, which is the purest, the most uniform, and the least wasting of all. It tends to moderate overstrained hope and enthusiastic speculation, as well as excessive care. Every thing by the participation of another being-by the intimate connexion of our existence with that of another, is rendered milder and more supportable. To this may be added, that tender charge, that heaven on earth, secured by nothing so much as wedded love, which lies in the possession of healthful and well educated children; that actual renovation reserved for us by their company, of which Cornaro, at the age of eighty, has given so affecting a picture.

When early marriages are recommended, it is not to be supposed that this recommendation applies to a matrimonial union, before the body has acquired its full growth and activity of functions. Nor are the rules of common worldly prudence to be so far lost sight of, as to encourage betrothing between boys and girls, and marriages entered into before the husband has yet marked out for himself any regular course of business or reputable employment, by which a reasonable prospect is afforded of ultimate success, and an income adequate to meet necessary expenses.

CLIMATE OF SPAIN.

As part of our plan of giving an account of the climate, and of the soil, as influencing climate, of the different countries on the face of the globe, we insert, on the present occasion, an interesting sketch of the temperature and winds of Spain, derived from

an authoritative source.*

"The soil of the Peninsula naturally exhibits great diversities. The central region consists for the most part of arid unsheltered plains, intersected with lofty mountains, which reflect with intolerable fierceness the scorching heat of summer, and sharpen

*The Foreign Quarterly Review, for July, 1831.

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