From this, very likely, followed all the false worship and gallantry of the barbarians; who still, keeping up this mode of treating women as superior in excellency, could scarcely deny to them a superior place in the family. Assumed to be absolutely chaste and pure, they are to be implicitly trusted--nor _to them_ is there impropriety! Hence follows the _fine Art_ exhibitions--the undress dress; the waltz; the mixed crowds--the _everything_, where women, according to the ordinary feelings of cultivated men, should not be, or be in a very different way. But the man before marriage, and afterwards, too, (excepting to his own wife), pretends to look upon woman as a divinity--as something far above him in moral goodness! _After_ marriage, it is difficult to dethrone this divinity--the man has not a divinity at the head of his family; but all his friends (male friends) pretend to think so; Society says so; and he is _himself_ compelled to _pretend to the same thing_. Under these circumstances he will never be likely to get much obedience. None the less, a struggle commences; the man persistent, strong; the woman unyielding, crafty; the family divided; the children demoralized; a false and wretched farce of conjugal _Play_, so badly acted as to deceive not even _Society!_ and finally ending in the Divorce Court. This is the tribunal where _Causes Matrimonial_ are settled; and, if one may judge from its Reports in the _Gazette_, conjugal contention is exceedingly common. For the public cases must be few, compared with those where publicity is avoided by private arrangement. Doubtless, a fine man and an excellent woman may unite, and live happily together, in spite of the unfavourable conditions. But, more commonly, the high-minded man, really believing in the superior purity of the sex, and her greater moral delicacy, finds his _Ideal_ to be too high; and without absolute cause to quarrel; in fact, seeing that his Ideal was _itself_ only an error of the prevailing delusion; ever after struggles to bring himself into harmony with the existing fact--to love and respect a woman and only a woman, with a woman's vanity, love of excitement, frivolity and caprice--a very weary work. The woman, too, still flattered, and exacting the devotion which her _lover_ (now her husband) gave to her in his days of delusion, thinks herself treated with coldness; and, gradually, by her unreasonable complaints, estranges altogether the husband, whom she, too, tries to forget, in the admiration, flatteries, and excitements of Society!