The subject of marriage generally is one of which men know less than they know of any other subject of universal interest. People are almost always wrong in their estimates of the marriages of others, and the best proof how little we know the real tastes and needs of those with whom we have been most intimate, is our unfailing surprise at the marriages they make. Very old and experienced people fancy they know a great deal about younger couples, but their guesses, there is good reason to believe, never _exactly_ hit the mark. Ever since this idea, that marriage is a subject we are all very ignorant about, had taken root in my own mind, many little incidents were perpetually occurring to confirm it; they proved to me, on the one hand, how often I had been mistaken about other people, and, on the other hand, how mistaken other people were concerning the only marriage I profess to know anything about, namely, my own. Our ignorance is all the darker that few men tell us the little that they know, that little being too closely bound up with that innermost privacy of life which every man of right feeling respects in his own case, as in the case of another. The only instances which are laid bare to the public view are the unhappy marriages, which are really not marriages at all. An unhappy alliance bears exactly the same relation to a true marriage that disease does to health, and the quarrels and misery of it are the crises by which Nature tries to bring about either the recovery of happiness, or the endurable peace of a settled separation. All that we really know about marriage is that it is based upon the most powerful of all our instincts, and that it shows its own justification in its fruits, especially in the prolonged and watchful care of children. But marriage is very complex in its effects, and there is one set of effects, resulting from it, to which remarkably little attention has been paid hitherto,--I mean its effects upon the intellectual life. Surely they deserve consideration by all who value culture.