employment, and fourteen of my sons be advanced in the army; should the ministry provide for the other seven in the Church, Excise Office, or Exchequer; and my poor girls, who are but tender infants at the boarding-school, should have places given to them in the Customs, which they might officiate by deputy—­don’t imagine that I am under any undue influence if I should happen always to vote with the Ministry.”  We do not quote further.  The letter is signed “MARGERY WELDONE.”

It is needless to tell you the wrong done to the sex by the rigour of modern law.  You have stamped the foot at it often enough.  I mean, not so much the separation in the whimsically-called union houses, for, as husbands go, they may have little to complain of on that score; but that dire injustice which throws upon woman the whole penalty of a mutual crime, of which the instigator is always man.  Then, is she not injured by the legislative removal of the sanctity of marriage, by which the man is less bound to her—­thinks less of the bond—­the vinculum matrimoniae being, in his mind, one of straw, to her one of iron.  And here, Eusebius, a difficulty presents itself which I do not remember ever to have seen met, no, nor even noticed.  How can a court ecclesiastical, which from its very constitution and formula of marriage which it receives and sanctions—­that marriage is a Divine institution, that man shall not put asunder those by this matrimony made one—­I ask, how can such a court deal with cases where the people have not been put together by the only bond of matrimony which the church can allow?  But these are painful subjects, and I feel myself wading in deeper water than will be good for one who can’t swim without corks, though he be levior cortice; and lighter than cork, too, will be the obligation on the man’s side, who has taken trusting woman to one of these registry houses, leaped over a broomstick and called it a marriage.  It will soon come to the truth of the old saying, “The first month is the honeymoon or smick-smack, the second is hither and thither; the third is thwick-thwack; the fourth, the devil take them that brought thee and I together.”

  “Love, light as air, at sight of human ties,
  Spreads his light wings, and in a moment flies.”

The great walking monster that does the great wrong to women is, depend upon it, Eusebius, the “brute of a husband,” called, by courtesy, in higher life, “Sir John Brute.”  Horace says wittily, that Venus puts together discordant persons and minds with a bitter joke, “saevo mittere cum joco;” it begins a jest, and ends a crying evil.  We name the thing that should be good, with an ambiguous sound that gives disagreement to the sense.  It is marry-age, or matter o’ money.  And let any man who is a euphonist, and takes omens from names, attend the publication of banns, he will be quite shocked at the unharmonious combination.  Now, you will laugh when I tell you positively, that within a twelvemonth I have heard called the banns of “John Smasher and Mary Smallbones;” no doubt, by this time they are “marrow bones and cleaver,” what else could be expected?  Did you never note how it has puzzled curates to read the ill-assorted names?