When she has given her husband her heart and its few little dependencies, her assets are reduced to the incontestable qualities with which nature, as a generous mother, has gifted her. It is true that since the passing of the Married Women’s Property Act, she has a right to possess property; but if she sets the least store by her peace of mind and the tranquillity of the household, she quickly gives up to her husband the rights which he considers as already his own in his quality of husband. You see, he takes a wife for better, for worse, and if he is no fool, he manages that it shall be for better. It is very simple.

The Englishman is an astute diplomatist; he knows how to rob the enemy of the sinew of war, and consequently of all liberty of action. He knows, too, how to make his wife understand in order that she may take great care of him, that his will is only to be made in her favour, if she has served him well.

A well-known American lady said not long ago, that of all the ways of earning a living, marriage was the hardest, most thankless, and least lucrative for a woman. In justice, I should add, however, that for one reason or another this lady had never tried it.

I know of an Englishman who, about fifty years ago succeeded in winning the hand of a rich girl, and supplanting a lover to whom she had previously plighted her troth. After having passed his life in reproaching his wife for her infidelity ... to the man she had jilted for him, this domestic tyrant vouchsafed to depart this life last year, and a few years of widowhood and peace seemed in store for his wife. But alas! when the will of this love of a husband was examined, it turned out that though there was no mistake about the widowhood, the peace was not so clear. He left everything to his son, that is to say, his own fortune and that of his wife which he had taken possession of, and was not even polite enough to restore to her. At the same time he charged his son to pay that lady £100 per annum, as long as she remained a widow: liberal treatment, was it not? ... for a faithful old servant. As for the supposition that it could enter into the head of the good woman to marry again, it was a joke in very doubtful taste on the part of the worthy defunct. She is at present in her seventy-third year. Her son is fast ruining himself on the Stock Exchange and the turf, so that her pittance of £100 a year is not so safe as it might be. But, whatever may happen, there is no danger that the poor lady, urged by despair, will go and drown herself; she would be too much afraid of rejoining her husband.

If you would study John Bull as a will maker, open the Illustrated London News, which gives testamentary news every Friday. The dearly beloved wife—this is the formula—will often be the object of your lively compassion.

If one may trust epitaphs, there are widows who seem, however, far from having cause of complaint against their poor defuncts.

I read on a handsome monument in Kensal Green Cemetery:

“Here lies John Davies,
The friend of the friendless,
The most tender of husbands.”

And lower down, on the same stone:

“Here lies Thomas Millard,
The friend of the friendless,
and the
Tender husband of the Widow of John Davies
above mentioned.”