The Express.
London, England, 1861-03-05 00:00:00

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LONDON TUESDAY, MARCH 6.

Tue instincts of the crowd are often sounder
than the sentiments of select society, in cases
where the true point of honour, not the counter-
feit, is in question, and where the chivalry of
honest natures is free to use • logic of Ma own.
The uproarious sympathy which hails the dramatic
female in distress is an example of this constantly
healthy and generous impulse of humanity, taken
in the mass ; and the applause which is sure to
follow any noble speech or worthy action is a sign
of the same spontaneous discernment. A well-
acted betrayer of innocence or oppressor of the
weak has a bad time of it before the vulgarest
audience. The popular conscience seldom delivers a
wrong verdict, and if Judge LYNCH commits an
occasional blunder, usurps too many functions, and
is inconveniently rapid in carrying out his men-
knees, at any rate his nose, for a scoundrel or a
sneak, is rarely at fault. Society, on the other
hand, has a world of mental reservations and con-
ventional hypocrisies which are the law of its life,
and make up its code of customary dissimulation.
Besides, society abhors good impulses ; and its
moral calendar leaves a wide margin for easy vices
made venial by occasion."
In the YrLvraTuN marriage case, which has
occupied the Court of Common Pleas in Dublin
for some ten days, and furnished a rich feast of
daily scandal at a singularly dull season, society
can hardly think otherwise of the parties than the
mob who pursued the ono with hooting. and
hisses, and escorted the other to her hotel with
clamorous emotion. It is not only a generous but
a just intuition which refuses to accept any justi-
fication or excuse for the selfiah conquest of a
woman's affections and the cruel betrayal of a
woman's trust. In spite of all the efforts of the
" strong-minded " school, it is still an article of
manly faith that the woman is the weaker vessel,
exposed by the fragility which is half the beauty
of her physical and moral framework to shocks
and accidents which the coarser clay of the sons of
ADAM suffers without a flaw or a stain. It was
Eva, no doubt, that first took of the fruit of the
tree of knowledge, and did eat and gave to her
husband ; and some daughters of Eve may, per-
haps, be found to follow the example of that
fatal curiosity. A woman who forgets herself for
a moment may do a more grievous social
wrong than fifty reckless and unprincipled men.
No sophistry of passion can disguise the immense
difference between the social consequences of a
man's trangressions and • woman's. But how im-
measurably greater is the penalty which the
woman pays for a crime which a man commits
with comparative impunity ! It is, therefore, a
sound natural instinct which in nine cases out of
ten regards the woman as the victim without
weighing too nicely the relations of the tempter to
the tempted. Nevertheless the conductors of
public opinion would ill discharge their office if
they were content to echo the generous clamour of
the unreasoning crowd. This Y/LLVIIIMON awe is
suggestive of warnings to men, women, and

families, which—after we have indulged the
sense of righteous indignation against •
human animal who glories in his own
dishonour and daunts his shameless lust before the
public gaze—we ought not to leave unrecorded. We
are not going to recapitulate in this place the cir-
cumstances alleged on this painful trial in proof or
disproof of a double marriage. Many of our con-
temporaries have nut waited for the verdict of the
jury to pass sentence in good round terms on the
character and conduct of the officer and gentleman,
whose theories of gentle blood in relation to the
" laudability " of seduction were so strikingly
illustrated in practice. ►ll this is commonplace
enough, and wants no artificial setting to show its
foulness to advantage. But it may be worth while,
without fatiguing our readers with a summary of
evidence with which they must be already too
familiar, to examine how in our exceedingly moral
and virtuous society a scandal so complicated and
so audacious as this begins and grows. How far
can we ctnsider the agents in the scandal ex-
ceptional characters, and the circumstances in
which they became involved exceptional also t
The first meeting of Jlajorlretvairrux with Mims
Tams Li iNowoarit, on board the Boulogne steam-
boat in the summer of 1852, supplies • key to all
that follows. The gentleman and the lady then
met for the first time. He puts her shawl over her
shoulders, covers her knees and his own with his
plaid, talks with her all the summer night, calls a
cab for her at London-bridge, drives with her to
her house and anuses there. There was no harm,
perhaps no indiscretion, in these delicate civilities.
." Where virtue is, these are more virtuous."
There was a long interval between the first and
the second meeting. Years passed before this
sudden intimacy was revived, and then it was by
a strange freak of fortune that a letter from the
lady came into the hands of the gentleman through
a third indifferent person, and • correspondence,
founded, v-u suppose, on the recollections of the
summer-night chat on the deck of the Boulogne
steamboat, was set up. If our readers have
perused attentively the startling prose in
which the lady indulged, they will have noted how
soon it WIA.4 pitched in the highest key. The lady's
letters are in the most approved style of the
fashionable love-novel ; tinged with a rapturous
dissembling fondue's, an involuntary abandonment
and yet a profound and permeating consciousness
of sex. Every sentence is a sandwich of chopped
French and hysterical English. High compliments
were paid by counsel to the intellect displayed in