Nor is it wise to marry for beauty alone: as even the finest landscape, seen daily, becomes monotonous, so does the most beautiful face, unless a beautiful nature shine through it. The beauty of to-day becomes commonplace to-morrow; whereas goodness, displayed through the most ordinary features, is perennially lovely. Moreover, this kind of beauty improves with age, and time ripens rather than destroys it. No man is so much to be pitied as the husband of a "professional beauty." Yet beauty, when it betokens health, or when it is the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace, is valuable, and has a great power of winning affection. Above all things do not marry a fool who will shame you and reveal your secrets. For ourselves we do not believe the first part at least of Archbishop Whately's definition of woman: "A creature that does not reason, and that pokes the fire from the top." The wife who does not and cannot make use of reason to overcome the daily difficulties of domestic life, and who can in no sense be called the companion of her husband, is a mate who hinders rather than helps. Sooner or later a household must fall into the hands of its women, and sink or swim according to their capacities. It is hard enough for a man to be married to a bad woman; but for a man who marries a foolish woman there is no hope. "One must love their friends with all their failings, but it is a great failing to be ill," and therefore unless you are one of those rare men who would never lose patience with a wife always in pain, when choosing you should think more of a healthy hue than of a hectic hue, and far more of good lungs than of a tightly-laced waist "See that she chews her food well, and sets her foot down firmly on the ground when she walks, and you're all right." As regards the marriageable age of women we may quote the following little conversation: "No woman is worth looking at after thirty," said young Mrs. A., a bride with all the arrogant youthfulness of twenty-one summers. "Quite true, my dear," answered Lady D., a very pretty woman some ten or fifteen years older; "nor worth listening to before." Please yourself, good sir! only do not marry either a child or an old woman. Certainly a man should marry to obtain a friend and companion rather than a cook and housekeeper; but yet that girl is a prize indeed who has so well prepared herself for the business of wifehood as to be able to keep not only her husband company, but her house in good order. "If that man is to be regarded as a benefactor of his species who makes two stalks of corn to grow where only one grew before, not less is she to be regarded as a public benefactor who economizes and turns to the best practical account the food products of human skill and labour."