wish that he could give relief without stirring up such a
pool of stinking mud. Who is benefitted by the disgusting details? It
is a fine thing for the penny papers. They get a large sale, and so reap
their reward. The _Times_, also, is generally not very backward when
anything peculiarly revolting and indecent is to be told; but are the
people, high or low, rich or poor, the better? I find it hard to believe
they are. How husbands can be false, how wives can intrigue, how
servants can connive, we know, and we do not want to hear it repeated.
If Prior's Chloe was an ale-house drab, if the Clara of Lord Bolingbroke
sold oranges in the Court of Requests, if Fielding kept indifferent
company, we are amused or grieved, but still learn something of genius,
even from its errors; but of the tribe Smith and Brown I care not to
hear--ever since the Deluge the Smiths and Browns have been much the
same. What am I the better for learning all the rottenness of domestic
life? Is that fit reading for the family circle? I suppose the
newspapers think it is, but I cannot come to that opinion. Can it have a
wholesome effect on the national feeling? Can it heighten the reverence
for Nature's primary ordinance of matrimony?

In the Book of Common Prayer I read that matrimony is "holy;" that it was
instituted of God in the time of man's innocency, signifying unto us the
mystical union that is between Christ and his Church, which holy estate
Christ adorned and beautified with his presence and first miracle that he
wrought in Cana of Galilee; and is commended of St. Paul to be honourable
among all men, and, therefore, is not by any to be enterprised, "nor
taken in hand unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly, to satisfy men's carnal
lusts or appetites, like brute beasts that have no understanding; but
reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God, duly
considering the causes for which matrimony was ordained."

Alas! our age is not a marrying age; and, therefore, I fear it is an
unholy one: neither our young men nor our young maidens honestly fall in
love and marry now-a-days. I don't know that the Registrar-General's
report says such. I know that many of his marriages are affairs of
convenience; unions of businesses, or thousands, or broad lands; not
marriages "holy," in the sense of the prayer-book and of God. A man who
marries simply for love, exposes himself to ridicule; the modern
ingenuous youth is not so gr