and indecent is to be told; but are the people, high or low, rich or poor, the better? I find it hard to believe they are. How husbands can be false, how wives can intrigue, how servants can connive, we know, and we do not want to hear it repeated. If Prior’s Chloe was an ale-house drab, if the Clara of Lord Bolingbroke sold oranges in the Court of Requests, if Fielding kept indifferent company, we are amused or grieved, but still learn something of genius, even from its errors; but of the tribe Smith and Brown I care not to hear—ever since the Deluge the Smiths and Browns have been much the same. What am I the better for learning all the rottenness of domestic life? Is that fit reading for the family circle? I suppose the newspapers think it is, but I cannot come to that opinion. Can it have a wholesome effect on the national feeling? Can it heighten the reverence for Nature’s primary ordinance of matrimony? In the Book of Common Prayer I read that matrimony is “holy;” that it was instituted of God in the time of man’s innocency, signifying unto us the mystical union that is between Christ and his Church, which holy estate Christ adorned and beautified with his presence and first miracle that he wrought in Cana of Galilee; and is commended of St. Paul to be honourable among all men, and, therefore, is not by any to be enterprised, “nor taken in hand unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly, to satisfy men’s carnal lusts or appetites, like brute beasts that have no understanding; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God, duly considering the causes for which matrimony was ordained.” Alas! our age is not a marrying age; and, therefore, I fear it is an unholy one: neither our young men nor our young maidens honestly fall in love and marry now-a-days. I don’t know that the Registrar-General’s report says such. I know that many of his marriages are affairs of convenience; unions of businesses, or thousands, or broad lands; not marriages “holy,” in the sense of the prayer-book and of God. A man who marries simply for love, exposes himself to ridicule; the modern ingenuous youth is not so green as all that; if he marries at all, it must be an heiress, or, at any rate, one well dowered. The last thing your modern well-bred beauty does, is to unite her fate with that of a man in the good old-fashioned way. She has learnt to set her heart upon the accidents of life,—the fine house, the establishment; and if these she cannot have, she will even die an old maid. The real is sacrificed to the imaginary; the substance, to the shadow; the present, to the morrow that never comes. A man says he will become rich; he will sacrifice everything to that; and the chances are he becomes poor in heart and purse. The maiden— With the meek brown eyes, In whose orb a shadow lies, Like the dusk in evening skies—