rcled stepping from
the chariot of the sun--nor limbs more graceful did ever Diana veil
beneath the shadows of Mount Latmos. But she is a fiend--a devil
incarnate, and the sovereign beauty of three counties has made your
house a hell.

But suppose that you have had the sense and sagacity to marry a homely
wife--or one comely at the best--nay, even that you have sought to
secure your peace by admitted ugliness--or wedded a woman whom all
tongues call--plain; then may an insurance-ticket, indeed, flame like
the sun in miniature on the front of your house--but what Joint-Stock
Company can undertake to repay the loss incurred by the perpetual
singeing of the smouldering flames of strife, that blaze up without
warning at bed and board, and keep you in an everlasting alarm of fire?
We defy you to utter the most glaring truth that shall not be instantly
contradicted. The most rational proposals for a day or hour of pleasure,
at home or abroad, are on the nail negatived as absurd. If you dine at
home every day for a month, she wonders why nobody asks you out, and
fears you take no trouble to make yourself agreeable. If you dine from
home one day in a month, then are you charged with being addicted to
tavern-clubs. Children are perpetual bones of contention--there is
hatred and sorrow in house-bills--rent and taxes are productive of
endless grievances; and although education be an excellent thing--indeed
quite a fortune in itself--especially to a poor Scotsman going to
England, where all the people are barbarous--yet is it irritatingly
expensive when a great Northern Nursery sends out its hordes, and gawky
hoydens and hobbletehoys are getting themselves accomplished in the
foreign languages, music, drawing, geography, the use of the globes, and
the dumb-bells.

"Let observation, with extensive view,
Survey mankind from China to Peru,"

(two bad lines, by the way, though written by Dr Johnson)--and
observation will find the literature of all countries filled with
sarcasms against the marriage-life. Our old Scottish songs and ballads
especially, delight in representing it as a state of ludicrous misery
and discomfort. There is little or no talk of horns--the dilemma of
English wit; but every individual moment of every individual minute, of
every individual hour of every individual day, and so on, has its
peculiar, appropriate, characteristic, and incurable wretchedness. Yet
the delightful thing is, that in spite of all