the very essence of wisdom, he will refuse it because he knows the behest proceeds from his wife.  He is like a jibbing horse, which you have to turn one way because you want him to start forward on the other; or he more closely resembles the celebrated Irish pig, which was so obstinate that his master was obliged to persuade him that he was being driven to Dublin, when his back was towards that city, and he was going to Athlone!

One part of management in husbands lies in a judicious mixture of good humor, attention, flattery, and compliments.  All men, as well as women, are more or less vain; the rare exceptions of men who do not care to be tickled by an occasional well-turned compliment only prove the rule.  But, in the case of a husband, we must remember that this love of being occasionally flattered by his wife is absolutely a necessary and natural virtue.  No one needs to be ashamed of it.  We are glad enough to own, to remember, to treasure up every little word of approval that fell from the lips of the woman we courted.  Why should we forget the dear sounds now she is our wife?  If we love her, she may be sure that any little compliment—­an offered flower, a birthday gift, a song when we are weary, a smile when we are sad, a look which no eye but our own will see—­will be treasured up, and will cheer us when she is not there.  Judiciously used, this conduct is of the greatest effect in managing the husband.  A little vanity does not, moreover, in such cases as these, prove a man to be either a bad man or a fool.  “All clever men,” says a great observer, “are more or less affected with vanity.  It may be blatant and offensive, it may be excessive, but not unamusing, or it may show itself just as a large soupcon, but it is never entirely absent.”  The same writer goes on to say that this vanity should by no means be injudiciously flattered into too large a size.  A wife will probably admire the husband for what he is really worth; and the vanity of a really clever man probably only amounts to putting a little too large a price on his merits, not to a mistake as to what those merits are.  The wife and husband will therefore think alike; but, if she be wise, she will only go to a certain point in administering the domestic lumps of sugar.  “A clever husband,” says the writer we have quoted, “is like a good despot; all the better for a little constitutional opposition.”  Or the same advice may be thus put, as it often is, by a wise and cautious mother-in-law:  “My dear,” she would say, “you must never let your husband have matters all his own way.”

A woman who abdicates all her authority, who is not queen over her kitchen, her chamber, and her drawing-room or best parlor, does a very dangerous and foolish thing, and will soon dwarf down into a mere assenting dummy.  Now old Burleigh, the wise counselor of Queen Elizabeth, has, in his advice to his son, left it upon record that “thou shalt find there is nothing so irksome in life as a female fool.”