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When again in private life we see a whole family one by one

dropping into the grave under the Ate of some inherited malady,

and the parents perhaps surviving them, do our minds ever go back

silently to that day twenty-five or thirty years before on which

under the fairest auspices, amid the rejoicings of friends and

acquaintances, a bride and bridegroom joined hands with one

another? In making such a reflection we are not opposing physical

considerations to moral, but moral to physical; we are seeking to

make the voice of reason heard, which drives us back from the

extravagance of sentimentalism on common sense. The late Dr.

Combe is said by his biographer to have resisted the temptation

to marriage, because he knew that he was subject to hereditary

consumption.