What is true of intellect is also in a large degree true of character. Two persons living constantly together should have many tastes and sympathies in common, and their characters will in most cases tend to assimilate. Yet great disparities of character may subsist in marriage, not only without evil but often with great advantage. This is especially the case where each supplies what is most needed in the other. Some natures require sedatives and others tonics; and it will often be found in a happy marriage that the union of two dissimilar natures stimulates the idle and inert, moderates the impetuous, gives generosity to the parsimonious and order to the extravagant, imparts the spirit of caution or the spirit of enterprise which is most needed, and corrects, by contact with a healthy and cheerful nature, the morbid and the desponding. Marriage may also very easily have opposite effects. It is not unfrequently founded on the sympathy of a common weakness, and when this is the case it can hardly fail to deepen the defect. On the whole, women, in some of the most valuable forms of strength--in the power of endurance and in the power of perseverance--are at least the equals of men. But weak and tremulous nerves, excessive sensibility, and an exaggerated share of impulse and emotion, are indissolubly associated with certain charms, both of manner and character, which are intensely feminine, and to many men intensely attractive. When a nature of this kind is wedded to a weak or a desponding man, the result will seldom be happiness to either party, but with a strong man such marriages are often very happy. Strength may wed with weakness or with strength, but weakness should beware of mating itself with weakness. It needs the oak to support the ivy with impunity, and there are many who find the constant contact of a happy and cheerful nature the first essential of their happiness. As it is not wise or right that either partner in marriage should lose his or her individuality, so it is right that each should have an independent sphere of authority. It is assumed, of course, that there is the perfect trust which should be the first condition of marriage and also a reasonable judgment. Many marriages have been permanently marred because the woman has been given no independence in money matters and is obliged to come for each small thing to her husband. In general the less the husband meddles in household matters, or the wife in professional ones, the better. The education of very young children of both sexes, and of girls of a mature age, will fall almost exclusively to the wife. The education of the boys when they have emerged from childhood will be rather governed by the judgment of the man. Many things will be regulated in common; but the larger interests of the family will usually fall chiefly to one partner, the smaller and more numerous ones to the other.