When a girl has reached the age of thirteen or fourteen, her parents become anxious to procure a husband for her. They do not wait for proposals, but make the first offers, sometimes to three or four men at a time, stating with them the amount and nature of the dowry they are disposed to give. They enter into a regular negotiation when a greater amount is required, and finally settle with him who remains satisfied with the most reasonable terms. The inclinations of their daughter are never consulted on the occasion, and too great a disparity of age, or other personal defects on the part of the future husband, never appear to them objectionable. The girl is sometimes perfectly unacquainted with the man of her parents’ choice; and, at her tender age, unable to form any judgment on the state of matrimony, she submits to their will with indifference. Not long after the nuptials, she is left perfect mistress of her actions, her domestic affairs are entirely put into the hands of the servants, and she never interferes with them. Neglected by her husband, and at full liberty to dispose of her time as she thinks proper, she forms connexions of intimacy with women more experienced in the world than herself. The attractions of pleasure and society become too strong to be resisted, and the example of others, with the numerous temptations that surround her, prove, sooner or later, fatal to her virtue. To the harmony which may have subsisted between her and her husband, succeeds disgust; quarrels soon follow, and blows sometimes are not spared on her. Her condition becomes at last intolerable, she quits her husband’s house, sues for a divorce, and generally obtains it, however frivolous the plea in the true sense of the law. Her fortune is given back to her, and enables her to live single, or to attract another husband, if she feels again an inclination to matrimony. She is now allowed her own choice of one; but, once accustomed to the agreeable paths of diversity, she seldom remains more faithful to the second than she had been to the first. The church of Wallachia and Moldavia is the only one professing the Greek religion that authorises divorce; or more properly speaking, the only one that abuses the power of pronouncing it, the authority being granted to the patriarch of Constantinople on occasions of the most particular nature, and indeed never made use of. In the principalities, the sentence of divorce is pronounced so frequently, the motives alleged are sometimes so frivolous, that it never affects the reputation of a woman, so as to degrade her in her ordinary rank of society; nor does it in the least become a scruple to the delicacy of the men, whatever may have been the nature of its motive. There are but few families at Bukorest who have long continued in an uninterrupted state of domestic harmony, and fewer still who can point out some relation who has not gone through a divorce.