“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 Lacedaemon 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 Lacedaemon, 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 Lacedaemon, 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: