“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—­