"Serpentes avibus geminantur, tigribus agni."
Then to look at the couples as they come to be bound for life. One would think they had been shaken together hap-hazard, each in a sack. I have met with a quotation from Hermippus who says—"There was at Lacedæmon a very retired hall or dwelling, in which the unmarried girls and young bachelors were confined, till each of the latter, in that obscurity which precluded the possibility of choice, fixed on one, which he was obliged to take as a wife, without portion. Lysander having abandoned that which fell to his lot, to marry another of greater beauty, was condemned to pay a heavy fine." Is there not in the Spectator a story or dream, where every man is obliged to choose a wife unseen, tied up in a sack? At this said Lacedæmon, by the by, women seem to have somewhat ruled the roast, and taken the law, at least before marriage, into their own hands; for Clearchus Solensis, in his adages, reports, that "at Lacedæmon, on a certain festival, the women dragged the unmarried men about the altar, and beat them with their hands, in order that a sense of shame at the indignity of this injury might excite in them a desire to have children of their own to educate, and to choose wives at a proper season for this purpose." Mr Stephens, in his Travels in Yucatan, shows how wives are taken and treated in the New World. "When the Indian grows up to manhood, he requires a woman to make him tortillas, and to provide him warm water for his bath at night. He procures one sometimes by the providence of the master, without much regard to similarity of tastes or parity of age; and though a young man is mated to an old woman, they live comfortably together. If he finds her guilty of any great offence, he brings her up before the master or the alcalde, gets her a whipping, and then takes her under his arm, and goes quietly home with her." This "whipping" the unromantic author considers not at all derogatory to the character of a kind husband, for he adds—"The Indian husband is rarely harsh to his wife, and the devotion of the wife to her husband is always a subject of remark." Some have made it a grave question whether marriages should not be made by the magistrate, and be proclaimed by the town-crier. To imagine which is a wrong and tyranny, and arises from the barbarous custom that no woman shall be the first to tell her mind in matters of affection. Men have set aside the privilege of Leap year; it is as great a nickname as the church's "convocation." We tie her tongue upon the first subject on which she would speak, then impudently call woman a babbler. There is no end, Eusebius, to the wrongs our tongues do the sex. We take up all old, and invent new, proverbs against them. Ungenerous as we are, we learn other languages out of spite, as it were, to abuse them with, and cry out, "One tongue is enough for a woman." We rate them for every thing and at nothing—thus: "He that loseth his wife and a farthing, hath a great loss of his farthing." There's not a natural evil but we contrive to couple them with it. "Wedding and ill-wintering tame both man and beast." I heard a witty invention the other day—it was by a lady, and a wife, and perhaps in her pride. It was asked whence came the saying, that "March comes in like a lion, and goes out like a lamb." "Because," said she, "he meets with Lady Day, and gets his quietus." Whatever we say against them, however, lacks the great essential—truth, and that is why we go on saying, thinking we shall come to it at last. We show more malice than matter. Birds ever peck at the fairest fruit; nay, cast it to the ground, and a man picks it up, tastes it, and says how good is it. He enjoys all good in a good wife, and yet too often complains. He rides a fast mare home to a smiling wife, pats them both in his delight, and calls them both jades—he unbridles the one, and bridles the other. There is no end to it; when one begins with the injustice we do the sex, we may go on for ever, and stick our rhapsodies together "with a hot needle, and a burnt thread," and no good will come of it. It is envy, jealousy—we don't like to see them so much better than ourselves. We dare not tell them what we really think of them, lest they should think less of us. So we speak with a disguise. Sir Walter Scott forgot himself when he spoke of them:—
"Oh woman, in our hours of ease,
Uncertain, coy, and hard to please;"
as if they were stormy peterals, whose appearance indicated shipwreck and troubled waters on the sea of life. Woman's bard, and such he deserves to be entitled, should only have thought of her as the "fair and gentle maid," or the "pleasing wife," placens uxor—the perfectness of man's nature, by whom he is united to goodness, gentleness, the two, man and woman united, making the complete one—as "Mulier est hominis confusio"—malevolent would he be that would mistranslate it "man's confusion," for—
"Madam, the meaning of this Latin is,
That womankind to man is sovereign bliss."—Dryden.
By this "mystical union," man is made "Paterfamilias," that name of truest dignity. See him in that best position, in the old monuments of James's time, kneeling with his spouse opposite at the same table, with their seven sons and seven daughters, sons behind the father, and daughters behind the mother. It is worth looking a day or two beyond the turmoil or even joys of our life, and to contemplate in the mind's eye, one's own post mortem and monumental honour. Such a sight, with all the loving thoughts of loving life, ere this maturity of family repose—is it not enough to make old bachelors gaze with envy, and go and advertise for wives?—each one sighing as he goes, that he has no happy home to receive him—no best of womankind his spouse—no children to run to meet him and devour him with kisses, while secret sweetness is overflowing at his heart and so he beats it like a poor player, and says, that is, if he be a Latinist—
"At non domus accipiet te læta, neque uxor
Optima, nec dulces occurrent oscula nati