scot-free; so that the woman who makes a _mésalliance_ suffers on every side, and destroys her life almost as much as the woman who goes wrong. All this is as evident to parents and elders as that the sun shines. They understand the imperative needs of social life, and they know how fleeting are the passions of youth and how they fade by time and use and inharmonious conditions; and they feel that their first duty to their children is to prevent a _mésalliance_ which has nothing, and can have nothing, but passion for its basis. But novelists and poets are against the hard dull dictates of worldly wisdom, and join in the apotheosis of love at any cost--all for love and the world well lost; love in a cottage, with nightingales and honeysuckles as the chief means of paying the rent; Libussa and her ploughman; the princess and the swineherd, &c. And the fathers who stand out against the ruin of their girls by means of estimable men of inferior condition and with not enough to live on, are stony-hearted and cruel, while the daughters who take to cold poison in the back-garden, if they cannot compass a secret honeymoon or an open flight, have all the world's sympathy and none of its censure. The cruel parent is the favourite whipping-boy of poetry and fiction; and yet which is likely to be the better guide--reason or passion? experience or ignorance? calculation or impulse? maturity which can judge or youth which can only feel? There would be no hesitation in any other case than that of love; but the love-instinct is generally considered to be superior to every other consideration, and has to be obeyed as a divine voice, no matter at what cost or consequence. The ideal of life, according to some, is founded on early marriages. But men are slower in the final setting of their character than women, and one never knows how a young fellow of twenty or so will turn out. If he is devout now, he may be an infidel at forty; if, under home influences, he is temperate and pure, when these are withdrawn he may become a rake of the fastest kind. His temper, morals, business power, ability to resist temptation, all are as yet inchoate and undefined; nothing is sure; and the girl's fancy that makes him perfect in proportion to his good looks, is a mere instinct determined by chance association. A girl, too, has more character than she shows in her girlhood. Though she sets sooner than men, she does not set unalterably, and marriage and maternity bring out the depths of her nature as nothing else can. It is only common-sense, then, to marry her to a man whose character is already somewhat formed, rather than to one who is still fluid and floating.