y of _professions_ of
attachment; plenty of persons impatient for my exit from the world; but
not one single grain of sorrow, for any anguish that might have attended
my approaching end. To me, no being in this world appears so wretched as
an _Old Bachelor_. Those circumstances, those changes in his person and
in his mind, which, in the husband, increase rather than diminish the
attentions to him, produce all the want of feeling attendant on disgust;
and he beholds, in the conduct of the mercenary crew that generally
surround him, little besides an eager desire to profit from that event,
the approach of which, nature makes a subject of sorrow with him.

219. Before I quit this part of my work, I cannot refrain from offering
my opinion with regard to what is due from husband to wife, when the
_disposal of his property_ comes to be thought of. When marriage is an
affair settled by deeds, contracts, and lawyers, the husband, being
bound beforehand, has really no _will_ to make. But where he has _a
will_ to make, and a faithful wife to leave behind him, it is his first
duty to provide for her future well-being, to the utmost of his power.
If she brought him _no money_, she brought him _her person_; and by
delivering that up to him, she established a claim to his careful
protection of her to the end of her life. Some men think, or act as if
they thought, that, if a wife bring no money, and if the husband gain
money by his business or profession, that money is _his_, and not hers,
because she has not been doing any of those things for which the money
has been received. But is this way of thinking _just_? By the marriage
vow, the husband endows the wife _with all his worldly goods_; and not a
bit too much is this, when she is giving him the command and possession
of her person. But does she _not help to acquire the money_? Speaking,
for instance, of the farmer or the merchant, the wife does not, indeed,
go to plough, or to look after the ploughing and sowing; she does not
purchase or sell the stock; she does not go to the fair or the market;
but she enables him to do all these without injury to his affairs at
home; she is the guardian of his property; she preserves what would
otherwise be lost to him. The barn and the granary, though they _create_
nothing, have, in the bringing of food to our mouths, as much merit as
the fields themselves. The wife does not, indeed, assist in the
merchant's counting-house; she does not go upon