wanted satisfaction, nor satisfaction ever bred satiety, he ruling because she would obey, or rather, because she would obey she therein ruling." Deliberation is wisdom before engaging to marry. Take time to think, to study, to know yourself, what you want, to know your favorite lady, or gentlemen friends, what they are likely to make, and whether there is any natural affinity or adaptation between you. Dr. Livingston is reported to have used to a young man the following "short and easy" argument against the marriages sometimes formed by students while in the seminary, and even in the college. "When you are nobody, you marry nobody; when you get to be somebody, you have got nobody." And a certain learned professor speaks in allusion to the same practice as follows: "Many of them (the students in theology) deem the irksome season of probation an admirable time for securing that best of earthly bless、 ings-a good wife; and thus a business in which the wisest man is apt to play the fool, they contrive to despatch at the period when every faculty, every affection of their being should be engrossed by the one great object which has received their consecration." Consider what a wife ought to be. Be not influenced alone by personal attractions. Let not the money question settle your choice. Money and lands are good, but utterly out of place when weighed in the balance against intellectual and moral endowments. Some wealthy maidens have a full share of good sense, modesty, culture, sweetness of temper, and tenderness; such ought not to be overlooked because of their hard cash. Notwithstanding the touch of worldliness in the great English statesman, Lord Burleigh's counsel to his son, it is based on wide experience and knowledge: "When it shall please God to bring thee to man's estate, use great providence and circumspection in choosing thy wife, for from thence will spring all thy future good or evil. And it is an action of life like unto a stratagem of war, wherein a man can die but once. If thy estate be good, match near home and at leisure; if weak, far off, and quickly. Inquire diligently of her disposition, and how her parents have been inclined in their youth. Let her not be poor, how generous (generosa, of good birth) soever, for a man can buy nothing in the market with gentility. Nor choose a base and unseemly creature altogether for wealth; for it will cause contempt in others and loathing in thee. Neither make choice of a dwarf or a fool; for by the one thou shalt beget a race of pigmies; the other will be thy universal disgrace, and it will irk thee to hear her talk. Thou shalt find, to thy great grief, that there is nothing more fulsome than a she-fool.” Next, however, to the "she-fool," is the slattern. Dirt is akin to vice, just as "cleanliness is next to godliness." A dirty man is considered more tolerable in this wicked world than a filthy woman. One of the most indispensable of all the female virtues, especially in an individual responsible as a housekeeper, is neatness. Many a man," tritely remarks Rev. H. Winslow, "has been mortified, humbled, broken down, and ruined, by having a slattern for his wife. It is very seldom that a husband becomes intemperate or vicious when his wife is thoroughly neat and tidy in her person and house. As long as she is inviting and tasteful in her appearance, carefully retains the attractions of her maidenhood, serves him with sweet and wholesome food, and diffuses an air of purity and comfort about her, it is hardly in any husband, not already brutalized by vice, to stray from the paradise which she creates in search of happiness. "In addition to the sacrifice of personal comfort, how mortifying, how afflictive, when a man would receive and entertain his friends, to feel it is rather a punishment than a pleasure to them, rather a penance than a privilege, to be welcomed to his hospitalities! Yet this is precisely the condition of many an unfortunate husband. It is one for which there is no remedy. It may be among the physical possibilities for a slattern to become, after she is married, a neat lady, but I never knew or heard of such a regeneration. It often happens that a neat wife contrives to improve her husband's neatness; but it almost or quite never happens that the husband improves that of his wife. His only alternative is to conform to her, which in fact by degrees he usually does, or to be tormented all his days. It adds to his affliction that he can never speak of it, never obtain any sympathy; silent as the grave, he must endure it alone." Fidelity and prudence are worth thinking about when in search |