Nevertheless, whether repressed by Art or curtailed by Nature, women’s characters certainly _appear_ less developed than those of men. If by Nature, it is a blessed provision—as all nature’s providings are. It is the woman’s place to be in rational subjection to the man; and though the sweet saints would sooner tear out the eyes of St. Paul[43] (we wonder he is such a favourite with them) than confess his precepts in terms, yet they do not fear to acknowledge that they have no respect for the man who succumbs to his wife, or admiration for the woman who aspires to denude her husband of his appropriate symbols of masterdom. If this happy inferiority—an inferiority which places them far above men in practical wisdom, inasmuch as it consists in shrewd, practical common sense, against a man’s intellectual blundering—if this happy inferiority is the result of Art, they exhibit in its adoption much sound wisdom. Man is an insolent, domineering, self-sufficient animal—let him _say_ what he will about the elevation of the female mind, we believe no man ever fell in love with the woman whom he felt to be wiser than himself. He could not endure for a partner for life, such a perpetual looking-glass and reminder of his own infirmities; he could not bear the constant attestation of his own weakness. He could regard patiently the vaunted accomplishments of another man, but he could not submit that his wife should be his acknowledged superior, and to be her foil—perhaps fool. Hence it is that wise men, so frequently that it is become proverbial, marry silly women. However much a learned man may admire female accomplishments, he detests a woman who strives to rival him in his own sphere, who is talking philosophy when he would be whispering “soft nothings,” and who freezes his ardent admiration with a dissertation on mathematics, or a moral discourse on self-control. He can bend, like any other man, with intense joy, over the blushing girl who tremblingly believes that her eyes are brighter and more lovely than the stars over her head; but would fling from him with disgust the woman who would repress his harmless and true—because soul-felt—flattery, with a philosophical disquisition on the nature, distances, and offices of the aforesaid stars. And it is because learned women too often strive by this injudicious ill-timed wisdom, to catch learned men for husbands, (and there are no more determined husband-hunters than blue-stocking women, because they are always within a year or two of being shelved), that the latter are necessarily flung into the arms of women who they know _can’t_ bore them with an eternal round of sense, from which every one is glad occasionally to escape, and never more so than when he is in love.