nd treat you to sour
looks thenceforward. So, in one way or another, life forces men apart
and breaks up the goodly fellowships for ever. The very flexibility and
ease which make men's friendships so agreeable while they endure, make
them the easier to destroy and forget. And a man who has a few friends,
or one who has a dozen (if there be any one so wealthy on this earth),
cannot forget on how precarious a base his happiness reposes; and how by
a stroke or two of fate--a death, a few light words, a piece of stamped
paper, a woman's bright eyes--he may be left, in a month, destitute of
all. Marriage is certainly a perilous remedy. Instead of on two or
three, you stake your happiness on one life only. But still, as the
bargain is more explicit and complete on your part, it is more so on the
other; and you have not to fear so many contingencies; it is not every
wind that can blow you from your anchorage; and so long as Death
withholds his sickle, you will always have a friend at home. People who
share a cell in the Bastile, or are thrown together on an uninhabited
isle, if they do not immediately fall to fisticuffs, will find some
possible ground of compromise. They will learn each other's ways and
humours, so as to know where they must go warily, and where they may
lean their whole weight. The discretion of the first years becomes the
settled habit of the last; and so, with wisdom and patience, two lives
may grow indissolubly into one.

But marriage, if comfortable, is not at all heroic. It certainly narrows
and damps the spirits of generous men. In marriage, a man becomes slack
and selfish, and under-goes a fatty degeneration of his moral being. It
is not only when Lydgate misallies himself with Rosamond Vincy, but when
Ladislaw marries above him with Dorothea, that this may be exemplified.
The air of the fireside withers out all the fine wildings of the
husband's heart. He is so comfortable and happy that he begins to prefer
comfort and happiness to everything else on earth, his wife included.
Yesterday he would have shared his last shilling; to-day "his first duty
is to his family," and is fulfilled in large measure by laying down
vintages and husbanding the health of an invaluable parent. Twenty years
ago this man was equally capable of crime or heroism; now he is fit for
neither. His soul is asleep, and you may speak without constraint; you
will not wake him. It is not for nothing that Don Quixote was a bachelor
and