your example, doctor, love is to
be avoided, because marriage is at best a dangerous experiment. The
experience of all time demonstrates that it is seldom a happy condition.
Jupiter and Juno to begin with; Venus and Vulcan. Fictions, to be sure,
but they show Homer's view of the conjugal state. Agamemnon in the
shades, though he congratulates Ulysses on his good fortune in having an
excellent wife, advises him not to trust even her too far. Come down
to realities, even to the masters of the wise: Socrates with Xantippe;
Euripides with his two wives, who made him a woman-hater; Cicero, who
was divorced; Marcus Aurelius.--Travel downwards: Dante, who, when he
left Florence, left his wife behind him; Milton, whose first wife ran
away from him; Shakespeare, who scarcely shines in the light of a happy
husband. And if such be the lot of the lights of the world, what can
humbler men expect?

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ You have given two or three heads of a catalogue
which, I admit, might be largely extended. You can never read a history,
you can never open a newspaper, without seeing some example of unhappy
marriage. But the conspicuous are not the frequent. In the quiet path
of every-day life--the _secretum iter et fallentis semita vita_--I could
show you many couples who are really comforts and helpmates to each
other. Then, above all things, children. The great blessing of old age,
the one that never fails, if all else fail, is a daughter.

_Mr. Falconer._ All daughters are not good.

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ Most are. Of all relations in life, it is the
least disappointing: where parents do not so treat their daughters as to
alienate their affections, which unhappily many do.

_Mr. Falconer._ You do not say so much for sons.

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ Young men are ambitious, self-willed,
self-indulgent, easily corrupted by bad example, of which there is
always too much. I cannot say much for those of the present day, though
it is not absolutely destitute of good specimens.

_Mr. Falconer._ You know what Paterculus says of those of his own day.

_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ 'The faith of wives towards the proscribed was
great; of freed-men, middling; of slaves, some; of sons, none.'{1} So he
says; but there were some: for example, of the sons of Marcus Oppius and
Quintus Cicero.{2} You may observe, by the way, he gives the first place
to the wives.

1 Id tamen nolandum est, fuisse in proscriptos uxorum fidem
summam