Home life stagnates in England; and in very few families is there any mean between dissipation and this stagnation. We can scarcely wonder that so many husbands think matrimony a mistake as we have it in our insular arrangements; that they look back regretfully to the time when they were unfettered and not bored; or that their free friends, who watch them as wild birds watch their caged companions, curiously and reflectively, share their opinion. Wife and home, after all, make up but part of a man's life; they are not his all, and do not satisfy the whole of his social instinct; nor is any one woman the concentration of all womanhood to a man, leaving nothing that is beautiful, nor in its own unconjugal way desirable, on the outside. Besides, when with his wife a man is often as much isolated as when alone, for any real companionship there is between them. Few women take a living interest in the lives of men, and fewer still understand them. They expect the husband to sympathize with them in the kitchen gossip and the nursery chatter, the neighbours' doings and all the small household politics; but they are utterly unable to comprehend his pleasures, his thoughts, his duties, the responsibilities of his profession, or the bearings of any public question in which he takes a part. Even if this were not so, and granting that they could enter fully into his life and sympathize with him as intelligent equals, not only as compassionate saints or loving children, there would still be the need of novelty, and still the certainty of boredom without it. For human life, like all other forms of life, must have a due proportion of fresh elements continually added to keep it sweet and growing, else it becomes stagnant and stunted. And daily intercourse undeniably exhausts the moral ground. After the close companionship of years no one can remain mentally fresh to the other, unless indeed one or both be of the rarest order of mind and of a practically inexhaustible power of acquiring knowledge. Save these exceptional instances, we must all of necessity get worn out by constant intercourse. We know every thought, every opinion, and almost every square inch of information possessed; we have heard the old stories again and again, and know exactly what will lead up to them, and at what point they will begin; we have measured the whole sweep of mind, and have probed its depths; and though we may love and value what we have learnt, yet we want something new--fresh food for interest, though not necessarily a new love for the displacement of the old. But this is what very few Englishwomen can understand or will allow. They hold so intensely by the doctrine of unity that they are even jealous of a man's pursuits, if they think these take up any place in his mind which might also be theirs. They must be good for every part of his life; and the poorest of them all must be his only source of interest, suffering no other woman to share his admiration nor obtain his