It is not too much to say that the great majority of wives equal this ideal.  United to such a woman, a man becomes better.  He can never be the perfect man unless married.  With marriage he undertakes those duties of existence which he is born to fulfill.  The excitements of life and of business, the selfishness of daily existence, diminish; the generosities of the heart expand; the health of the mind becomes daily more robust; small repressions of selfishness, daily concessions, and daily trials, render him better; the woman of his choice becomes his equal, and in lifting her he lifts himself.  He may not be a genius, nor she very clever; but, once truly married, the real education of life begins.  That is not education which varnishes a man or a woman over with the pleasant and shining accomplishments which fit us for society, but that which tends to improve the heart, to bring forward the reflective qualities, and to form a firm and regular character; that which cultivates the reason, subdues the passions, restrains them in their proper place, trains us to self-denial, makes us able to bear trials, and to refer them, and all our sentiments and feelings to their proper source; which makes us look beyond this world into the next.  A man’s wife, if properly chosen, will aid in all this.  The most brilliant and original thinker, and the deepest philosopher we have—­he who has written books which educate the statesmen and the leaders of the world—­has told us in his last preface that he, having lost his wife, has lost his chief inspiration.  Looking back at his works, he traces all that is noble, all that is advanced in thought and grand in idea, and all that is true in expression, not to a poet or a teacher, but to his own wife; in losing her he says he has lost much, but the world has lost more.  So, also, two men, very opposite in feelings, in genius, and in character, and as opposite in their pursuits, declared at a late period in their lives—­lives spent in industry and hard work, and in expression of what the world deemed their own particular genius—­“that they owed all to their wives.”  These men were Sir Walter Scott and Daniel O’Connell.  “The very gods rejoice,” says Menu the sage, “when the wife is honored.  When the wife is injured, the whole family decays; when the contrary is the case, it flourishes.”  This may be taken as an eternal truth—­as one of those truths not to be put by, not to be argued down by casual exceptions.  It is just as true of nations as it is of men; of the whole people as it is of individual families.  So true it is, that it may be regarded as a piece of very sound advice when we counsel all men, married or single, to choose only such men for their friends as are happy in their wedded lives.  No man can afford to know a broken family.  Quarreling, discord, and connubial disagreements are catching.  With unhappiness at home, no man is safely to be trusted, no woman to be sought in friendship.  The fault may not be his or hers,