Society Shocked.

Cromwell Argus, Volume III, Issue 151, 1 October 1872, Page 7

Society Shocked.

The Melbourne correspondent of the Daily Thms says : There has been a great shock occasioned to Melbourne " society" within the last few days. A man of the utmost respectability, a leading light of the Church of England, although a layman, a Judge of County Court, who had temporarily acted as a member of the Bench of the Supreme Court, and is looked upon as the next to bo promoted to that position, a man great at Bible Societies and in Societies for the Advancement of Morality, has done a frightful thing, which strikes at the very foundation of society. He has married his housemaid! Good heavens ! It is clear that nothing is sacred in these days, and that we are rapidly drifting into a state of chaos and anarchy. Jt is not long since our wretched pseudo-aristocracy was shaken to its centre by a young lady qmttiii'/ the house of a soft-goods plutocrat and marrying a betting man, and now this dark nefarious deed repeats the shock. Worse than all, it is believed that many fair daughters of "society'would willingly have married the old Judge themselves, had not this too attrae tive housemaid stepped to the front and assumed tlie mistress-ship of the house which once she dusted. While society has viewed this aff.tir with feelings in which horror and amazement are wildly blended, the Church, too, feels itself outraged. For this man——long a pillar of the sacred edifice, Anglican to the backbone, who wore a hat of the most saintly and cedes ; cal pattern—has trampled on every law. human and divine, by getting married in a Congregational chapel. This is another upheaval of the depths, and strict churchmen view it with despair.' You may well think that church and society have set themselves to invent plausible hypotheses to account for the act, and many have obtained circulation, which it would be libellous even to hint at. The best of it all is, that there is not the smallest reason to believe that they are true, and they may be fairly ascribed to the vengeance of society against a man who has defied its code of petty laws in so wilful a manner.