But if Sinner Simon and his disciples,—(most assuredly they ought to be unsainted!) were right in this doctrine, happy marriages would be far more uncommon than they are; the man might with better likelihood of finding it look for a needle in a bottle of hay, than seek for his other half in this wide world; and the woman's chance would be so immeasurably less, that no intelligible form of figures could express her fraction of it.
The man who gets in love because he has determined to marry, instead of marrying because he is in love, goes about to private parties and to public places in search of a wife; and there he is attracted by a woman's appearance, and the figure which she makes in public, not by her amiable deportment, her domestic qualities and her good report. Watering places might with equal propriety be called fishing places, because they are frequented by female anglers, who are in quest of such prey, the elder for their daughters, the younger for themselves. But it is a dangerous sport, for the fair Piscatrix is not more likely to catch a bonito, or a dorado, than she is to be caught by a shark.
Thomas Day, not old Thomas Day of the old glee, nor the young Thomas Day either,—a father and son whose names are married to immortal music,—but the Thomas Day who wrote Sandford and Merton, and who had a heart which generally led him right, and a head which as generally led him wrong; that Thomas Day thought that the best way of obtaining a wife to his mind, was to breed one up for himself. So he selected two little orphan girls from a charity school, with the intention of marrying in due time the one whom he should like best. Of course such proper securities as could alone justify the managers of the charity in consenting to so uncommon a transaction, were required and given. The experiment succeeded in every thing—except its specific object; for he found at last that love was not a thing thus to be bespoken on either side; and his Lucretia and Sabrina, as he named them, grew up to be good wives for other men. I do not know whether the life of Thomas Day has yet found its appropriate place in the Wonderful Magazine, or in the collection entitled Eccentric Biography,—but the Reader may find it livelily related in Miss Seward's Life of Darwin.
The experiment of breeding a wife is not likely to be repeated. None but a most determined theorist would attempt it; and to carry it into effect would require considerable means of fortune, not to mention a more than ordinary share of patience: after which there must needs be a greater disparity of years than can be approved in theory upon any due consideration of human nature, and any reasonable estimate of the chances of human life.
CHAPTER LV. P. I.
THE AUTHOR'S LAST VISIT TO DONCASTER.
Fuere quondam, hæc sed fuere;
Nunc ubi sint, rogitas? Id annos
Scire hos oportet scilicet. O bonæ
Musæ, O Lepôres—O Charites meræ!
O gaudia offuscata nullis
Litibus! O sine nube soles!
JANUS DOUZA.