I place cheerfulness before love, because angry and melancholy people are unlovable. If you wish to be loved and happy, be lovable. Strive to please, to make those about you happy, and then you will be lovable. Cheerfulness is the first step.
A very sensible writer in the Phrenological Journal says,—
“There is not enough thought, and time, and consideration devoted to this inevitable requisite, love. It is kept too much in the background. How many years are given to preparing young people for professions, trades, and occupations; how much counsel and advice are heaped around these topics; and yet how little importance is attached to the very influence which will probably be the turning-point of their lives. No wonder there are so many unhappy marriages. If we could only remember that boys and girls are not to be educated for lawyers, merchants, school-teachers, or housekeepers alone, but for husbands and wives, as well.”
Those girls are the most chaste and ladylike who have been brought up with a family, or neighborhood, or school of boys; and on the other hand, those boys who have from their earliest days been accustomed to female restraint and girlhood’s influences, make the best men, and most faithful, loving husbands and fathers.
What shall I say of those demoralizing institutions where the “young ladies” are taught algebra, languages, and ill manners? Where they are forbidden to recognize a gentleman in the school-room, prayer-room, or street? Can you, honest reader, believe there are such institutions in our enlightened land? Yet there are; where the sexes are denied not only the association with, but are forbidden the common courtesies of life; where, if a friend or brother lifts his hat to the young lady, while belonging to that institution, she is forbidden to acknowledge the courtesy.
I remember Mrs. Brandyball, in one of Theodore Hook’s novels of society, boasting of her seminary for young ladies as one of the safest in the world, being entirely surrounded by a dense wall, eight feet high, surmounted by sharp spikes and broken glass bottles. I reckon all the virtue preserved in this way was not worth the cost of its defences.
Fences broken down.
The writer passed some time in a town where these discourtesies were promulgated. I boarded with a pious family, where a large number of male students boarded also. There was one class of influences and passions pervading that place. All female influence and restraint were withdrawn. And what was the result? The boys were forbidden to smoke, or chew tobacco, or play at cards. They reckoned me as a “right jolly good fellow,” because I could be induced to play a game of euchre with them; but they occasionally smoked me out of their rooms, and I was repeatedly compelled to check their wonted flow of licentious conversation. Cards, as an innocent amusement, I could stand, but the “accomplishments” referred to I could not endure. Shall I, as a physician, mention the positive evidence, the pathognomonic indications which were revealed to me in the faces of many of those young men; of vulgar habits, which are less often or seldom revealed in those who customarily associate in pure female society? They had little or no respect for the opposite sex. Their ideas of them, thoughts and conversations, were most gross. If some now and then, as they occasionally would, took a stolen interview, a walk at night, when “Old Prof.” was asleep, it was with no more exalted views of purity than any other midnight criminal prowlers are supposed to cherish.
And the girls? Alas! they were ready to flirt with every strange man, drummer, or else, who came into the village. The aforesaid pious landlord assured me further, what my eyes did not see, that he knew of girls climbing out of the windows at night, and partaking of stolen rides and interviews as late as midnight; and he pointed out to me one coy, plump little miss, who he knew “had been out as late as one or two A. M., taking a ride with a gentleman scholar.”
The scholars all met in the “chapel” for prayers. Are sly glances, winks, or billets-doux prayers? If so, they prayed fervently.