Montaigne: “As soon as women are ours we are no longer theirs.” “The land of marriage has this peculiarity that strangers are desirous of inhabiting it, while its natural inhabitants would willingly be banished thence.” Boucicault: “I wish that Adam had died with all his ribs in his body.” De Finod: “Marriage is the sunset of love.” Goldsmith: “Many of the English marry in order to have one happy month in their lives.” Hood: “You can’t wive and thrive both in the same year.” Southey: “There are three things a wise man will not trust,—the wind, the sunshine of an April day, and a woman’s plighted faith.” Byron: “I remarked in my illness the complete inertion, inaction, and destruction of my chief mental faculties. I tried to rouse them, and yet could not—and this is the _Soul_!!! I should believe that it was married to the body if they did not sympathise so much with each other.” Colley Cibber: “Oh, how many torments lie in the small circle of a wedding-ring!” Alphonse Karr: “Women for the most part do not love us. They do not choose a man because they love him, but because it pleases them to be loved by him.” Lady Montagu: “It goes far toward reconciling me to being a woman, when I reflect that I am thus in no immediate danger of ever marrying one.” Schopenhauer: “It is well known that happy marriages are rare.” “The lover, contrary to expectation, finds himself no happier than before.” Byron— “Think you if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife He would have written sonnets all his life?” Burton: “Paul commended marriage, yet he preferred a single life.” Buxton: “Juliet was a fool to kill herself, for in three months she’d have married again, and been glad to be quit of Romeo.” Heine: “The music at a marriage procession always reminds me of the music which leads soldiers to battle.” Lessing— “Ein einzig böses Weib gibt’s höchstens in der Welt, Nur schade dass ein jeder es für das seine hält.” “Of shrewish women in the world there’s surely only one, A pity, though, that every man says she’s the wife he won.” Selden: “Marriage is a desperate thing. The frogs in Æsop were extremely wise; they had a great mind to some water, but they would not leap into the well, because they could not get out again.” When the Pope heard of Father Hyacinthe’s marriage, says Cheales, he exclaimed: “The saints be praised! the renegade has taken his punishment into his own hands. Truly the ways of Providence are inscrutable!” FEMININE INFERIORITY Why are women so mysterious, so inscrutable? Cynics say because you cannot calculate what they will do, as they have no fixed compass by which they steer, _i.e._ no character. But Heine takes up their defence. Far from having no character, he says, they have a new one every day.