Æschylus, Apollonius, and Caesar, and having read them till daylight failed, made a last pillow for his head of the three volumes, and took a fatal dose of laudanum. Some again, by the terrible blackness of the clouds that had gathered over life, seem almost excused, as the crime of Jocasta against herself, or the death of Nero; while others — like those of Dr. Brown, who had prognosticated the ruin of England, and was so mortified by the brilliant successes of the Pitt administration that he cut his throat; and the Colonel in Dr. Darwin’s “Zoönomia,” who blew his brains out because he could not eat muffins without suffering from indigestion — tend to the positively ludicrous. We are thus often betrayed, from one cause or another, into forgetting for the moment that the act of suicide is really only one of impatience with the crosses of life, and a confession of defeat. Immeasurably sad it often is, as in the case of Mary Aird; but in spite of the pathos surrounding the unhappy incident I have selected as typically pathetic, it is better to look at it gravely. We would, of course, far rather see in it only a young mother sacrificing her dearest treasures, life and the love of husband and child, under the delusion that her death was for their benefit; but we are compelled to see in it much more than that. Lurking under the delusion lies the faint-hearted apprehension that to-morrow would be, and must be, just the same as to-day, a fear of the future that underlies every wilful suicide, and is at once the most disastrous and deplorable frame of the human mind. If troubles are ahead, the more need for, the more honor in, a resolute hold on life. Our race does not readily yield to despair, and every suicide among us, even though it be a woman’s, takes something therefore from our national
