rnal promptings of
inherited instinct, and opposes the foolish and selfish suggestions of
interested outsiders. It is the perpetual protest of poor banished human
nature against the expelling pitchfork of calculating expediency in the
matrimonial market. While parents and moralists are for ever saying,
'Don't marry for beauty; don't marry for inclination; don't marry for
love: marry for money, marry for social position, marry for advancement,
marry for our convenience, not for your own,' the romance-writer is for
ever urging, on the other hand, 'Marry for love, and for love only.' His
great theme in all ages has been the opposition between parental or
other external wishes and the true promptings of the young and
unsophisticated human heart. He has been the chief ally of sentiment and
of nature. He has filled the heads of all our girls with what Sir George
Campbell describes off-hand as 'foolish ideas about love.' He has
preserved us from the hateful conventions of civilisation. He has
exalted the claims of personal attraction, of the mysterious native
yearning of heart for heart, of the indefinite and indescribable element
of mutual selection; and, in so doing, he has unconsciously proved
himself the best friend of human improvement and the deadliest enemy of
all those hideous 'social lies which warp us from the living truth.' His
mission is to deliver the world from Dr. Johnson and Sir George
Campbell.

For, strange to say, it is the moralists and the doctrinaires who are
always in the wrong: it is the sentimentalists and the rebels who are
always in the right in this matter. If the common moral maxims of
society could have had their way--if we had all chosen our wives and our
husbands, not for their beauty or their manliness, not for their eyes or
their moustaches, not for their attractiveness or their vivacity, but
for their 'sterling qualities of mind and character,' we should now
doubtless be a miserable race of prigs and bookworms, of martinets and
puritans, of nervous invalids and feeble idiots. It is because our young
men and maidens will not hearken to these penny-wise apophthegms of
shallow sophistry--because they often prefer _Romeo and Juliet_ to the
'Whole Duty of Man,' and a beautiful face to a round balance at
Coutts's--that we still preserve some vitality and some individual
features, in spite of our grinding and crushing civilisation. The men
who marry balances, as Mr. Galton has shown, happily die out