debating the subject with another lady.  “You know, dear,” said the first, “after ten years of marriage, if he is nothing else, your husband is always an old friend.”  “I have many old friends,” returned the other, “but I prefer them to be nothing more.”  “Oh, perhaps I might prefer that also!”  There is a common note in these three illustrations of the modern idyll; and it must be owned the god goes among us with a limping gait and blear eyes.  You wonder whether it was so always; whether desire was always equally dull and spiritless, and possession equally cold.  I cannot help fancying most people make, ere they marry, some such table of recommendations as Hannah Godwin wrote to her brother William anent her friend, Miss Gay.  It is so charmingly comical, and so pat to the occasion, that I must quote a few phrases.  “The young lady is in every sense formed to make one of your disposition really happy.  She has a pleasing voice, with which she accompanies her musical instrument with judgment.  She has an easy politeness in her manners, neither free nor reserved.  She is a good housekeeper and a good economist, and yet of a generous disposition.  As to her internal accomplishments, I have reason to speak still more highly of them: good sense without vanity, a penetrating judgment without a disposition to satire, with about as much religion as my William likes, struck me with a wish that she was my William’s wife.”  That is about the tune: pleasing voice, moderate good looks, unimpeachable internal accomplishments after the style of the copy-book, with about as much religion as my William likes; and then, with all speed, to church.

To deal plainly, if they only married when they fell in love, most people would die unwed; and among the others, there would be not a few tumultuous households.  The Lion is the King of Beasts, but he is scarcely suitable for a domestic pet.  In the same way, I suspect love is rather too violent a passion to make, in all cases, a good domestic sentiment.  Like other violent excitements, it throws up not only what is best, but what is worst and smallest, in men’s characters.  Just as some people are malicious in drink, or brawling and virulent under the influence of religious feeling, some are moody, jealous, and exacting when they are in love, who are honest, downright, good-hearted fellows enough in the everyday affairs and humours of the world.

How then, seeing we are driven to the hypothesis that people choose in comparatively cold blood, how is it they choose so well?  One is almost tempted to hint that it does not much matter whom you marry; that, in fact, marriage is a subjective affection, and if you have made up your mind to it, and once talked yourself fairly over, you could “pull it through” with anybody.  But even if we take matrimony at its lowest, even if we regard it as no more than a sort of friendship recognised by the police, there must be degrees in the freedom and sympathy realised, and some principle to guide simple folk in their selection.  Now what should this principle be?  Are there no more definite rules than are to be found in the Prayer-book?  Law and religion forbid the bans on the ground of propinquity or consanguinity; society steps in to separate classes; and in all this most critical matter, has common sense, has wisdom, never a word to say?  In the absence of more magisterial teaching, let us talk it over between friends: even a few guesses may be of interest to youths and maidens.

In all that concerns eating and drinking, company, climate, and ways of life, community of taste is to be sought for.  It would be trying, for instance, to keep bed and board with an early riser or a vegetarian.  In matters of art and intellect, I believe it is of no consequence.  Certainly it is of none in the companionships of men, who will dine more readily with one who has a good heart, a good cellar, and a humorous tongue, than with another who shares all their favourite hobbies and is melancholy withal.  If your wife likes Tupper, that is no reason why you should hang your head.  She thinks with the majority, and has the courage of her opinions.  I have always suspected public taste to be a mongrel product, out of affectation by dogmatism; and felt sure, if you could only find an honest man of no special literary bent, he would tell you he thought much of Shakespeare bombastic and most absurd, and all of him written in very obscure English and wearisome to read.  And not long ago I was able to lay by my lantern in content, for I found the honest man.  He was a fellow of parts, quick, humorous, a clever painter, and with an eye for certain poetical effects of sea and ships.  I am not much of a judge of that kind of thing, but a sketch of his comes before me sometimes at night.  How strong, supple, and living the ship seems upon the billows!  With what a dip and rake she shears the flying sea!  I cannot fancy the man who saw this effect, and took it on the wing with so much force and spirit, was what you call commonplace in the last recesses of the heart.  And yet he thought, and was not ashamed to have it known of him, that Ouida was better in every way than William Shakespeare.  If there were more people of his honesty, this would be about the staple of lay criticism.  It is not taste that is plentiful, but courage that is rare.  And what have we in place?  How many, who think no otherwise than the young painter, have we not heard disbursing second-hand hyperboles?  Have you never turned sick at heart, O best of critics! when some of your own sweet adjectives were returned on you before a gaping audience?  Enthusiasm about art is become a function of the average female being, which she performs with precision and a sort of haunting sprightliness, like an ingenious and well-regulated machine.  Sometimes, alas! the calmest man is carried away in the torrent, bandies adjectives with the best, and out-Herods Herod for some shameful moments.  When you remember that, you will be tempted to put things strongly, and say you will marry no one who is not like George the Second, and cannot state openly a distaste for poetry and painting.

The word “facts” is, in some ways, crucial.  I have spoken with Jesuits and Plymouth Brethren, mathematicians and poets, dogmatic republicans and dear old gentlemen in bird’s-eye neckcloths; and each understood the word “facts” in an occult sense of his own.  Try as I might, I could get no nearer the principle of their division.  What was essential to them, seemed to me trivial or untrue.  We could come to no compromise as to what was, or what was not, important in the life of man.  Turn as we pleased, we all stood back to back in a big ring, and saw another quarter of the heavens, with different mountain-tops along the sky-line and different constellations overhead.  We had each of us some whimsy in the brain, which we believed more than anything else, and which discoloured all experience to its own shade.  How would you have people agree, when one is deaf and the other blind?  Now this is where there should be community between man and wife.  They should be agreed on their catchword in “facts of religion,” or “facts of science,” or “society, my dear”; for without such an agreement all intercourse is a painful strain upon the mind.  “About as much religion as my William likes,” in short, that is what is necessary to make a happy couple of any William and his spouse.  For there are differences which no habit nor affection can reconcile, and the Bohemian must not intermarry with the Pharisee.  Imagine Consuelo as Mrs. Samuel Budget, the wife of the successful merchant!  The best of men and the best of women may sometimes live together all their lives, and, for want of some consent on fundamental questions, hold each other lost spirits to the end.

A certain sort of talent is almost indispensable for people who would spend years together and not bore themselves to death.  But the talent, like