slaying of an adulteress taken en flagrant délit, so far as to hold the avenging husband free of the highest guilt, and only liable for manslaughter.[1] This relic of custom has been so far modified by judicial interpretations that a man is only allowed the benefit of it when he acts literally in the moment of wrath, and it is becoming less safe for him, year by year, to punish faithlessness by death. The modern explanation of this toleration of violence is that the provocation has been intolerable, but it seems more reasonable to regard it as a survival of that old feeling which Calderon has expressed in one of the most powerful of his plays, where "the physician of his own honour," a man who has murdered his wife, knowing her to be innocent, for no reason but that she is the object of a dishonourable love, is publicly praised by the King, and rewarded with marriage to another noble lady, who takes his hand, knowing it, as she herself admits, to be "bathed in blood."[2] Calderon exhibits the feeling that the wife's chastity was due to her husband rather than herself in its most extravagant form; while modern English practice has very nearly reached the point when adultery is only punishable as the breach of a very solemn contract, by which the man has suffered loss as husband and father. It will be noted that the husband's rights were given to him to safeguard the family; and as the worship of ancestors, the family name, and the succession to property have never been regarded as liable to suffer by the husband's adultery, he has never been punishable; though his wife has been allowed the relief of a judicial separation or of divorce, the redress
