heir judgments by a
most undue attention to little niceties of personal appearance, habits,
disposition, and other trifles which concern nobody but the lady
herself. An unhappy gentleman, resolving to wed nothing short of
perfection, keeps his heart and hand till both get so old and withered
that no tolerable woman will accept them. Now this is the very height
of absurdity. A kind Providence has so skilfully adapted sex to sex and
the mass of individuals to each other, that, with certain obvious
exceptions, any male and female may be moderately happy in the married
state. The true rule is to ascertain that the match is fundamentally a
good one, and then to take it for granted that all minor objections,
should there be such, will vanish, if you let them alone. Only put
yourself beyond hazard as to the real basis of matrimonial bliss, and
it is scarcely to be imagined what miracles, in the way of recognizing
smaller incongruities, connubial love will effect.

For my own part I freely confess that, in my bachelorship, I was
precisely such an over-curious simpleton as I now advise the reader not
to be. My early habits had gifted me with a feminine sensibility and
too exquisite refinement. I was the accomplished graduate of a dry
goods store, where, by dint of ministering to the whims of fine ladies,
and suiting silken hose to delicate limbs, and handling satins,
ribbons, chintzes calicoes, tapes, gauze, and cambric needles, I grew
up a very ladylike sort of a gentleman. It is not assuming too much to
affirm that the ladies themselves were hardly so ladylike as Thomas
Bullfrog. So painfully acute was my sense of female imperfection, and
such varied excellence did I require in the woman whom I could love,
that there was an awful risk of my getting no wife at all, or of being
driven to perpetrate matrimony with my own image in the looking-glass.
Besides the fundamental principle already hinted at, I demanded the
fresh bloom of youth, pearly teeth, glossy ringlets, and the whole list
of lovely items, with the utmost delicacy of habits and sentiments, a
silken texture of mind, and, above all, a virgin heart. In a word, if a
young angel just from paradise, yet dressed in earthly fashion, had
come and offered me her hand, it is by no means certain that I should
have taken it. There was every chance of my becoming a most miserable
old bachelor, when, by the best luck in the world, I made a journey
into another state, and was smitte