03 - Letter 3

LETTER III TO A LOVER

82. There are two descriptions of Lovers on whom all advice would be wasted; namely, those in whose minds passion so wholly overpowers reason as to deprive the party of his sober senses. Few people are entitled to more compassion than young men thus affected: it is a species of insanity that assails them; and, when it produces self-destruction, which it does in England more frequently than in all the other countries in the world put together, the mortal remains of the sufferer ought to be dealt with in as tender a manner as that of which the most merciful construction of the law will allow. If SIR SAMUEL ROMILLY’S remains were, as they were, in fact, treated as those of a person labouring under ’temporary mental derangement,’ surely the youth who destroys his life on account of unrequited love, ought to be considered in as mild a light! SIR SAMUEL was represented, in the evidence taken before the Coroner’s Jury, to have been inconsolable for the loss of his wife; that this loss had so dreadful an effect upon his mind, that it bereft him of his reason, made life insupportable, and led him to commit the act of suicide: and, on this ground alone, his remains and his estate were rescued from the awful, though just and wise, sentence of the law. But, unfortunately for the reputation of the administration of that just and wise law, there had been, only about two years before, a poor man, at Manchester, buried in crossroads, and under circumstances which entitled his remains to mercy much more clearly than in the case of SIR SAMUEL ROMILLY.

83. This unfortunate youth, whose name was SMITH, and who was a shoemaker, was in love with a young woman, who, in spite of all his importunities and his proofs of ardent passion, refused to marry him, and even discovered her liking for another; and he, unable to support life, accompanied by the thought of her being in possession of any body but himself, put an end to his life by the means of a rope. If, in any case, we are to presume the existence of insanity; if, in any case, we are led to believe the thing without positive proof; if, in any case, there can be an apology in human nature itself, for such an act; this was that case. We all know (as I observed at the time); that is to say, all of us who cannot wait to calculate upon the gains and losses of the affair; all of us, except those who are endowed with this provident frigidity, know well what youthful love is; and what its torments are, when accompanied by even the smallest portion of jealousy. Every man, and especially every Englishman (for here we seldom love or hate by halves), will recollect how many mad pranks he has played; how many wild and ridiculous things he has said and done between the age of sixteen and that of twenty-two; how many times a kind glance has scattered all his reasoning and resolutions to the winds; how many times a cool look has plunged him into the deepest misery! Poor SMITH, who was at this age of love and madness, might, surely, be presumed to have done the deed in a moment of ’temporary mental derangement.’ He was an object of compassion in every humane breast: he had parents and brethren and kindred and friends to lament his death, and to feel shame at the disgrace inflicted on his lifeless body: yet, HE was pronounced to be a felo de se, or self-murderer, and his body was put into a hole by the way-side, with a stake driven down through it; while that of ROMILLY had mercy extended to it, on the ground that the act had been occasioned by ’temporary mental derangement’ caused by his grief for the death of his wife!

84. To reason with passion like that of the unfortunate SMITH, is perfectly useless; you may, with as much chance of success, reason and remonstrate with the winds or the waves: if you make impression, it lasts but for a moment: your effort, like an inadequate stoppage of waters, only adds, in the end, to the violence of the torrent: the current must have and will have its course, be the consequences what they may. In cases not quite so decided, absence, the sight of new faces, the sound of new voices, generally serve, if not as a radical cure, as a mitigation, at least, of the disease. But, the worst of it is, that, on this point, we have the girls (and women too) against us! For they look upon it as right that every lover should be a little maddish; and, every attempt to rescue him from the thraldom imposed by their charms, they look upon as an overt act of treason against their natural sovereignty. No girl ever liked a young man less for his having done things foolish and wild and ridiculous, provided she was sure that love of her had been the cause: let her but be satisfied upon this score, and there are very few things which she will not forgive. And, though wholly unconscious of the fact, she is a great and sound philosopher after all. For, from the nature of things, the rearing of a family always has been, is, and must ever be, attended with cares and troubles, which must infallibly produce, at times, feelings to be combated and overcome by nothing short of that ardent affection which first brought the parties together. So that, talk as long as Parson MALTHUS likes about ’moral restraint;’ and report as long as the Committees of Parliament please about preventing ’premature and improvident marriages’ amongst the labouring classes, the passion that they would restrain, while it is necessary to the existence of mankind, is the greatest of all the compensations for the inevitable cares, troubles, hardships, and sorrows of life; and, as to the marriages, if they could once be rendered universally provident, every generous sentiment would quickly be banished from the world.

85. The other description of lovers, with whom it is useless to reason, are those who love according to the rules of arithmetic, or who measure their matrimonial expectations by the chain of the land-surveyor. These are not love and marriage; they are bargain and sale. Young men will naturally, and almost necessarily, fix their choice on young women in their own rank in life; because from habit and intercourse they will know them best. But, if the length of the girl’s purse, present or contingent, be a consideration with the man, or the length of his purse, present or contingent, be a consideration with her, it is an affair of bargain and sale. I know that kings, princes, and princesses are, in respect of marriage, restrained by the law: I know that nobles, if not thus restrained by positive law, are restrained, in fact, by the very nature of their order. And here is a disadvantage which, as far as real enjoyment of life is concerned, more than counterbalances all the advantages that they possess over the rest of the community. This disadvantage, generally speaking, pursues rank and riches downwards, till you approach very nearly to that numerous class who live by manual labour, becoming, however, less and less as you descend. You generally find even very vulgar rich men making a sacrifice of their natural and rational taste to their mean and ridiculous pride, and thereby providing for themselves an ample supply of misery for life. By preferring ’provident marriages’ to marriages of love, they think to secure themselves against all the evils of poverty; but, if poverty come, and come it may, and frequently does, in spite of the best laid plans, and best modes of conduct; if poverty come, then where is the counterbalance for that ardent mutual affection, which troubles, and losses, and crosses always increase rather than diminish, and which, amidst all the calamities that can befall a man, whispers to his heart, that his best possession is still left him unimpaired? The WORCESTERSHIRE BARONET, who has had to endure the sneers of fools on account of his marriage with a beautiful and virtuous servant maid, would, were the present ruinous measures of the Government to drive him from his mansion to a cottage, still have a source of happiness; while many of those, who might fall in company with him, would, in addition to all their other troubles, have, perhaps, to endure the reproaches of wives to whom poverty, or even humble life, would be insupportable.

86. If marrying for the sake of money be, under any circumstances, despicable, if not disgraceful; if it be, generally speaking, a species of legal prostitution, only a little less shameful than that which, under some governments, is openly licensed for the sake of a tax; if this be the case generally, what ought to be said of a young man, who, in the heyday of youth, should couple himself on to a libidinous woman, old enough, perhaps, to be his grandmother, ugly as the nightmare, offensive alike to the sight and the smell, and who should pretend to love her too: and all this merely for the sake of her money? Why, it ought, and it, doubtless, would be said of him, that his conduct was a libel on both man and womankind; that his name ought, for ever, to be synonymous with baseness and nastiness, and that in no age and in no nation, not marked by a general depravity of manners, and total absence of all sense of shame, every associate, male or female, of such a man, or of his filthy mate, would be held in abhorrence. Public morality would drive such a hateful pair from society, and strict justice would hunt them from the face of the earth.

87. BUONAPARTE could not be said to marry for money, but his motive was little better. It was for dominion, for power, for ambition, and that, too, of the most contemptible kind. I knew an American Gentleman, with whom BUONAPARTE had always been a great favourite; but the moment the news arrived of his divorce and second marriage, he gave him up. This piece of grand prostitution was too much to be defended. And the truth is, that BUONAPARTE might have dated his decline from the day of that marriage. My American friend said, ’If I had been he, I would, in the first place, have married the poorest and prettiest girl in all France.’ If he had done this, he would, in all probability, have now been on an imperial throne, instead of being eaten by worms at the bottom of a very deep hole in Saint Helena; whence, however, his bones convey to the world the moral, that to marry for money, for ambition, or from any motive other than the one pointed out by affection, is not the road to glory, to happiness, or to peace.

88. Let me now turn from these two descriptions of lovers, with whom it is useless to reason, and address myself to you, my reader, whom I suppose to be a real lover, but not so smitten as to be bereft of your reason. You should never forget, that marriage, which is a state that every young person ought to have in view, is a thing to last for life; and that, generally speaking, it is to make life happy, or miserable; for, though a man may bring his mind to something nearly a state of indifference, even that is misery, except with those who can hardly be reckoned amongst sensitive beings. Marriage brings numerous cares, which are amply compensated by the more numerous delights which are their companions. But to have the delights, as well as the cares, the choice of the partner must be fortunate. I say fortunate; for, after all, love, real love, impassioned affection, is an ingredient so absolutely necessary, that no perfect reliance can be placed on the judgment. Yet, the judgment may do something; reason may have some influence; and, therefore, I here offer you my advice with regard to the exercise of that reason.

89. The things which you ought to desire in a wife are, 1. Chastity; 2. sobriety; 3. industry; 4. frugality; 5. cleanliness; 6. knowledge of domestic affairs; 7. good temper; 8. beauty.

90. I. CHASTITY, perfect modesty, in word, deed, and even thought, is so essential, that, without it, no female is fit to be a wife. It is not enough that a young woman abstain from everything approaching towards indecorum in her behaviour towards men; it is, with me, not enough that she cast down her eyes, or turn aside her head with a smile, when she hears an indelicate allusion: she ought to appear not to understand it, and to receive from it no more impression than if she were a post. A loose woman is a disagreeable acquaintance: what must she be, then, as a wife? Love is so blind, and vanity is so busy in persuading us that our own qualities will be sufficient to ensure fidelity, that we are very apt to think nothing, or, at any rate, very little, of trifling symptoms of levity; but if such symptoms show themselves now, we may be well assured, that we shall never possess the power of effecting a cure. If prudery mean false modesty, it is to be despised; but if it mean modesty pushed to the utmost extent, I confess that I like it. Your ’free and hearty’ girls I have liked very well to talk and laugh with; but never, for one moment, did it enter into my mind that I could have endured a ’free and hearty’ girl for a wife. The thing is, I repeat, to last for life; it is to be a counterbalance for troubles and misfortunes; and it must, therefore, be perfect, or it had better not be at all. To say that one despises jealousy is foolish; it is a thing to be lamented; but the very elements of it ought to be avoided. Gross indeed is the beast, for he is unworthy of the name of man; nasty indeed is the wretch, who can even entertain the thought of putting himself between a pair of sheets with a wife of whose infidelity he possesses the proof; but, in such cases, a man ought to be very slow to believe appearances; and he ought not to decide against his wife but upon the clearest proof. The last, and, indeed, the only effectual safeguard is, to begin well; to make a good choice; to let the beginning be such as to render infidelity and jealousy next to impossible. If you begin in grossness; if you couple yourself on to one with whom you have taken liberties, infidelity is the natural and just consequence. When a Peer of the realm, who had not been over-fortunate in his matrimonial affairs, was urging MAJOR CARTWRIGHT to seek for nothing more than ’moderate reform,’ the Major (forgetting the domestic circumstances of his Lordship) asked him how he should relish ’moderate chastity’ in a wife! The bare use of the two words, thus coupled together, is sufficient to excite disgust. Yet with this ’moderate chastity’ you must be, and ought to be, content, if you have entered into marriage with one, in whom you have ever discovered the slightest approach towards lewdness, either in deeds, words, or looks. To marry has been your own act; you have made the contract for your own gratification; you knew the character of the other party; and the children, if any, or the community, are not to be the sufferers for your gross and corrupt passion. ’Moderate chastity’ is all that you have, in fact, contracted for: you have it, and you have no reason to complain. When I come to address myself to the husband, I shall have to say more upon this subject, which I dismiss for the present with observing, that my observation has convinced me, that, when families are rendered unhappy from the existence of ’moderate chastity,’ the fault, first or last, has been in the man, ninety-nine times out of every hundred.

91. SOBRIETY. By sobriety I do not mean merely an absence of drinking to a state of intoxication; for, if that be hateful in a man, what must it be in a woman! There is a Latin proverb, which says, that wine, that is to say, intoxication, brings forth truth. Whatever it may do in this way, in men, in women it is sure, unless prevented by age or by salutary ugliness, to produce a moderate, and a very moderate, portion of chastity. There never was a drunken woman, a woman who loved strong drink, who was chaste, if the opportunity of being the contrary presented itself to her. There are cases where health requires wine, and even small portions of more ardent liquor; but (reserving what I have further to say on this point, till I come to the conduct of the husband) young unmarried women can seldom stand in need of these stimulants; and, at any rate, only in cases of well-known definite ailments. Wine! ’only a glass or two of wine at dinner, or so’! As soon as have married a girl whom I had thought liable to be persuaded to drink, habitually, ’only a glass or two of wine at dinner, or so;’ as soon as have married such a girl, I would have taken a strumpet from the streets. And it has not required age to give me this way of thinking: it has always been rooted in my mind from the moment that I began to think the girls prettier than posts. There are few things so disgusting as a guzzling woman. A gormandizing one is bad enough; but, one who tips off the liquor with an appetite, and exclaims ’good! good!’ by a smack of her lips, is fit for nothing but a brothel. There may be cases, amongst the hard-labouring women, such as reapers, for instance, especially when they have children at the breast; there may be cases, where very hard-working women may stand in need of a little good beer; beer, which, if taken in immoderate quantities, would produce intoxication. But, while I only allow the possibility of the existence of such cases, I deny the necessity of any strong drink at all in every other case. Yet, in this metropolis, it is the general custom for tradesmen, journeymen, and even labourers, to have regularly on their tables the big brewers’ poison, twice in every day, and at the rate of not less than a pot to a person, women, as well as men, as the allowance for the day. A pot of poison a day, at fivepence the pot, amounts to seven pounds and two shillings in the year! Man and wife suck down, in this way, fourteen pounds four shillings a year! Is it any wonder that they are clad in rags, that they are skin and bone, and that their children are covered with filth?

92. But by the word SOBRIETY, in a young woman, I mean a great deal more than even a rigid abstinence from that love of drink, which I am not to suppose, and which I do not believe, to exist any thing like generally amongst the young women of this country. I mean a great deal more than this; I mean sobriety of conduct. The word sober, and its derivatives, do not confine themselves to matters of drink: they express steadiness, seriousness, carefulness, scrupulous propriety of conduct; and they are thus used amongst country people in many parts of England. When a Somersetshire fellow makes too free with a girl, she reproves him with, ’Come! be sober!’ And when we wish a team, or any thing, to be moved on steadily and with great care, we cry out to the carter, or other operator, ’Soberly, soberly.’ Now, this species of sobriety is a great qualification in the person you mean to make your wife. Skipping, capering, romping, rattling girls are very amusing where all costs and other consequences are out of the question; and they may become sober in the Somersetshire sense of the word. But while you have no certainty of this, you have a presumptive argument on the other side. To be sure, when girls are mere children, they are to play and romp like children. But, when they arrive at that age which turns their thoughts towards that sort of connexion which is to be theirs for life; when they begin to think of having the command of a house, however small or poor, it is time for them to cast away the levity of the child. It is natural, nor is it very wrong, that I know of, for children to like to gad about and to see all sorts of strange sights, though I do not approve of this even in children: but, if I could not have found a young woman (and I am sure I never should have married an old one) who I was not sure possessed all the qualities expressed by the word sobriety, I should have remained a bachelor to the end of that life, which, in that case, would, I am satisfied, have terminated without my having performed a thousandth part of those labours which have been, and are, in spite of all political prejudice, the wonder of all who have seen, or heard of, them. Scores of gentlemen have, at different times, expressed to me their surprise, that I was ’always in spirits;’ that nothing pulled me down; and the truth is, that, throughout nearly forty years of troubles, losses, and crosses, assailed all the while by more numerous and powerful enemies than ever man had before to contend with, and performing, at the same time, labours greater than man ever before performed; all those labours requiring mental exertion, and some of them mental exertion of the highest order; the truth is, that, throughout the whole of this long time of troubles and of labours, I have never known a single hour of real anxiety; the troubles have been no troubles to me; I have not known what lowness of spirits meaned; have been more gay, and felt less care, than any bachelor that ever lived. ’You are always in spirits, Cobbett!’ To be sure; for why should I not? Poverty I have always set at defiance, and I could, therefore, defy the temptations of riches; and, as to home and children, I had taken care to provide myself with an inexhaustible store of that ’sobriety,’ which I am so strongly recommending my reader to provide himself with; or, if he cannot do that, to deliberate long before he ventures on the life-enduring matrimonial voyage. This sobriety is a title to trust-worthiness; and this, young man, is the treasure that you ought to prize far above all others. Miserable is the husband, who, when he crosses the threshold of his house, carries with him doubts and fears and suspicions. I do not mean suspicions of the fidelity of his wife, but of her care, frugality, attention to his interests, and to the health and morals of his children. Miserable is the man, who cannot leave all unlocked, and who is not sure, quite certain, that all is as safe as if grasped in his own hand. He is the happy husband, who can go away, at a moment’s warning, leaving his house and his family with as little anxiety as he quits an inn, not more fearing to find, on his return, any thing wrong, than he would fear a discontinuance of the rising and setting of the sun, and if, as in my case, leaving books and papers all lying about at sixes and sevens, finding them arranged in proper order, and the room, during the lucky interval, freed from the effects of his and his ploughman’s or gardener’s dirty shoes. Such a man has no real cares; such a man has no troubles; and this is the sort of life that I have led. I have had all the numerous and indescribable delights of home and children, and, at the same time, all the bachelor’s freedom from domestic cares: and to this cause, far more than to any other, my readers owe those labours, which I never could have performed, if even the slightest degree of want of confidence at home had ever once entered into my mind.

93. But, in order to possess this precious trust-worthiness, you must, if you can, exercise your reason in the choice of your partner. If she be vain of her person, very fond of dress, fond of flattery, at all given to gadding about, fond of what are called parties of pleasure, or coquetish, though in the least degree; if either of these, she never will be trust-worthy; worthy; she cannot change her nature; and if you marry her, you will be unjust if you expect trust-worthiness at her hands. But, besides this, even if you find in her that innate ’sobriety’ of which I have been speaking, there requires on your part, and that at once too, confidence and trust without any limit. Confidence is, in this case, nothing unless it be reciprocal. To have a trust-worthy wife, you must begin by showing her, even before you are married, that you have no suspicions, no fears, no doubts, with regard to her. Many a man has been discarded by a virtuous girl, merely on account of his querulous conduct. All women despise jealous men; and, if they marry such their motive is other than that of affection. Therefore, begin by proofs of unlimited confidence; and, as example may serve to assist precept, and as I never have preached that which I have not practised, I will give you the history of my own conduct in this respect.

94. When I first saw my wife, she was thirteen years old, and I was within about a month of twenty-one. She was the daughter of a Serjeant of artillery, and I was the Serjeant-Major of a regiment of foot, both stationed in forts near the city of St. John, in the Province of New-Brunswick. I sat in the same room with her, for about an hour, in company with others, and I made up my mind that she was the very girl for me. That I thought her beautiful is certain, for that I had always said should be an indispensable qualification; but I saw in her what I deemed marks of that sobriety of conduct of which I have said so much, and which has been by far the greatest blessing of my life. It was now dead of winter, and, of course, the snow several feet deep on the ground, and the weather piercing cold. It was my habit, when I had done my morning’s writing, to go out at break of day to take a walk on a hill at the foot of which our barracks lay. In about three mornings after I had first seen her, I had, by an invitation to breakfast with me, got up two young men to join me in my walk; and our road lay by the house of her father and mother. It was hardly light, but she was out on the snow, scrubbing out a washing-tub. ’That’s the girl for me,’ said I, when we had got out of her hearing. One of these young men came to England soon afterwards; and he, who keeps an inn in Yorkshire, came over to Preston, at the time of the election, to verify whether I were the same man. When he found that I was, he appeared surprised; but what was his surprise, when I told him that those tall young men, whom he saw around me, were the sons of that pretty little girl that he and I saw scrubbing out the washing-tub on the snow in New-Brunswick at day-break in the morning!

95. From the day that I first spoke to her, I never had a thought of her ever being the wife of any other man, more than I had a thought of her being transformed into a chest of drawers; and I formed my resolution at once, to marry her as soon as we could get permission, and to get out of the army as soon as I could. So that this matter was, at once, settled as firmly as if written in the book of fate. At the end of about six months, my regiment, and I along with it, were removed to FREDERICKTON, a distance of a hundred miles, up the river of ST. JOHN; and, which was worse, the artillery were expected to go off to England a year or two before our regiment! The artillery went, and she along with them; and now it was that I acted a part becoming a real and sensible lover. I was aware, that, when she got to that gay place WOOLWICH, the house of her father and mother, necessarily visited by numerous persons not the most select, might become unpleasant to her, and I did not like, besides, that she should continue to work hard. I had saved a hundred and fifty guineas, the earnings of my early hours, in writing for the paymaster, the quartermaster, and others, in addition to the savings of my own pay. I sent her all my money, before she sailed; and wrote to her to beg of her, if she found her home uncomfortable, to hire a lodging with respectable people: and, at any rate, not to spare the money, by any means, but to buy herself good clothes, and to live without hard work, until I arrived in England; and I, in order to induce her to lay out the money, told her that I should get plenty more before I came home.

96. As the malignity of the devil would have it, we were kept abroad two years longer than our time, Mr. PITT (England not being so tame then as she is now) having knocked up a dust with Spain about Nootka Sound. Oh, how I cursed Nootka Sound, and poor bawling Pitt too, I am afraid! At the end of four years, however, home I came; landed at Portsmouth, and got my discharge from the army by the great kindness of poor LORD EDWARD FITZGERALD, who was then the Major of my regiment. I found my little girl a servant of all work (and hard work it was), at five pounds a year, in the house of a CAPTAIN BRISAC; and, without hardly saying a word about the matter, she put into my hands the whole of my hundred and fifty guineas unbroken!

97. Need I tell the reader what my feelings were? Need I tell kind-hearted English parents what effect this anecdote must have produced on the minds of our children? Need I attempt to describe what effect this example ought to have on every young woman who shall do me the honour to read this book? Admiration of her conduct, and self-gratulation on this indubitable proof of the soundness of my own judgment, were now added to my love of her beautiful person.

98. Now, I do not say that there are not many young women of this country who would, under similar circumstances, have acted as my wife did in this case; on the contrary, I hope, and do sincerely believe, that there are. But when her age is considered; when we reflect, that she was living in a place crowded, literally crowded, with gaily-dressed and handsome young men, many of whom really far richer and in higher rank than I was, and scores of them ready to offer her their hand; when we reflect that she was living amongst young women who put upon their backs every shilling that they could come at; when we see her keeping the bag of gold untouched, and working hard to provide herself with but mere necessary apparel, and doing this while she was passing from fourteen to eighteen years of age; when we view the whole of the circumstances, we must say that here is an example, which, while it reflects honour on her sex, ought to have weight with every young woman whose eyes or ears this relation shall reach.

99. If any young man imagine, that this great sobriety of conduct in young women must be accompanied with seriousness approaching to gloom, he is, according to my experience and observation, very much deceived. The contrary is the fact; for I have found that as, amongst men, your jovial companions are, except over the bottle, the dullest and most insipid of souls; so amongst women, the gay, rattling, and laughing, are, unless some party of pleasure, or something out of domestic life, is going on, generally in the dumps and blue-devils. Some stimulus is always craved after by this description of women; some sight to be seen, something to see or hear other than what is to be found at home, which, as it affords no incitement, nothing ’to raise and keep up the spirits’, is looked upon merely as a place to be at for want of a better; merely a place for eating and drinking, and the like; merely a biding place, whence to sally in search of enjoyments. A greater curse than a wife of this description, it would be somewhat difficult to find; and, in your character of Lover, you are to provide against it. I hate a dull, melancholy, moping thing: I could not have existed in the same house with such a thing for a single month. The mopers are, too, all giggle at other times: the gaiety is for others, and the moping for the husband, to comfort him, happy man, when he is alone: plenty of smiles and of badinage for others, and for him to participate with others; but the moping is reserved exclusively for him. One hour she is capering about, as if rehearsing a jig; and, the next, sighing to the motion of a lazy needle, or weeping over a novel and this is called sentiment! Music, indeed! Give me a mother singing to her clean and fat and rosy baby, and making the house ring with her extravagant and hyperbolical encomiums on it. That is the music which is ’the food of love;’ and not the formal, pedantic noises, an affectation of skill in which is now-a-days the ruin of half the young couples in the middle rank of life. Let any man observe, as I so frequently have, with delight, the excessive fondness of the labouring people for their children. Let him observe with what pride they dress them out on a Sunday, with means deducted from their own scanty meals. Let him observe the husband, who has toiled all the week like a horse, nursing the baby, while the wife is preparing the bit of dinner. Let him observe them both abstaining from a sufficiency, lest the children should feel the pinchings of hunger. Let him observe, in short, the whole of their demeanour, the real mutual affection, evinced, not in words, but in unequivocal deeds. Let him observe these things, and, having then cast a look at the lives of the great and wealthy, he will say, with me, that, when a man is choosing his partner for life, the dread of poverty ought to be cast to the winds. A labourer’s cottage, on a Sunday; the husband or wife having a baby in arms, looking at two or three older ones playing between the flower-borders going from the wicket to the door, is, according to my taste, the most interesting object that eyes ever beheld; and, it is an object to be beheld in no country upon earth but England. In France, a labourer’s cottage means a shed with a dung-heap before the door; and it means much about the same in America, where it is wholly inexcusable. In riding once, about five years ago, from Petworth to Horsham, on a Sunday in the afternoon, I came to a solitary cottage which stood at about twenty yards distance from the road. There was the wife with the baby in her arms, the husband teaching another child to walk, while four more were at play before them. I stopped and looked at them for some time, and then, turning my horse, rode up to the wicket, getting into talk by asking the distance to Horsham. I found that the man worked chiefly in the woods, and that he was doing pretty well. The wife was then only twenty-two, and the man only twenty-five. She was a pretty woman, even for Sussex, which, not excepting Lancashire, contains the prettiest women in England. He was a very fine and stout young man. ’Why,’ said I, ’how many children do you reckon to have at last?’ ’I do not care how many,’ said the man: ’God never sends mouths without sending meat.’ ’Did you ever hear,’ said I, ’of one PARSON MALTHUS?’ ’No, sir.’ ’Why, if he were to hear of your works, he would be outrageous; for he wants an act of parliament to prevent poor people from marrying young, and from having such lots of children.’ ’Oh! the brute!’ exclaimed the wife; while the husband laughed, thinking that I was joking. I asked the man whether he had ever had relief from the parish; and upon his answering in the negative, I took out my purse, took from it enough to bait my horse at Horsham, and to clear my turnpikes to WORTH, whither I was going in order to stay awhile, and gave him all the rest. Now, is it not a shame, is it not a sin of all sins, that people like these should, by acts of the government, be reduced to such misery as to be induced to abandon their homes and their country, to seek, in a foreign land, the means of preventing themselves and their children from starving? And this has been, and now is, actually the case with many such families in this same county of Sussex!

100. An ardent-minded young man (who, by-the-by, will, as I am afraid, have been wearied by this rambling digression) may fear, that this great sobriety of conduct in a young woman, for which I have been so strenuously contending, argues a want of that warmth, which he naturally so much desires; and, if my observation and experience warranted the entertaining of this fear, I should say, had I to live my life over again, give me the warmth, and I will stand my chance as to the rest. But, this observation and this experience tell me the contrary; they tell me that levity is, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the companion of a want of ardent feeling. Prostitutes never love, and, for the far greater part, never did. Their passion, which is more mere animal than any thing else, is easily gratified; they, like rakes, change not only without pain, but with pleasure; that is to say, pleasure as great as they can enjoy. Women of light minds have seldom any ardent passion; love is a mere name, unless confined to one object; and young women, in whom levity of conduct is observable, will not be thus restricted. I do not, however, recommend a young man to be too severe in judging, where the conduct does not go beyond mere levity, and is not bordering on loose conduct; for something depends here upon constitution and animal spirits, and something also upon the manners of the country. That levity, which, in a French girl, I should not have thought a great deal of, would have frightened me away from an English or an American girl. When I was in France, just after I was married, there happened to be amongst our acquaintance a gay, sprightly girl, of about seventeen. I was remonstrating with her, one day, on the facility with which she seemed to shift her smiles from object to object; and she, stretching one arm out in an upward direction, the other in a downward direction, raising herself upon one foot, leaning her body on one side, and thus throwing herself into flying attitude, answered my grave lecture by singing, in a very sweet voice (significantly bowing her head and smiling at the same time), the following lines from the vaudeville, in the play of Figaro:

Si l’amour a des ailles;

N’est ce pas pour voltiger? That is, if love has wings, is it not to flutter about with? The wit, argument, and manner, all together, silenced me. She, after I left France, married a very worthy man, has had a large family, and has been, and is, a most excellent wife and mother. But that which does sometimes well in France, does not do here at all. Our manners are more grave: steadiness is the rule, and levity the exception. Love may voltige in France; but, in England, it cannot, with safety to the lover: and it is a truth which, I believe, no man of attentive observation will deny, that, as, in general, English wives are more warm in their conjugal attachments than those of France, so, with regard to individuals, that those English women who are the most light in their manners, and who are the least constant in their attachments, have the smallest portion of that warmth, that indescribable passion which God has given to human beings as the great counterbalance to all the sorrows and sufferings of life.

101. INDUSTRY. By industry, I do not mean merely laboriousness, merely labour or activity of body, for purposes of gain or of saving; for there may be industry amongst those who have more money than they know well what to do with: and there may be lazy ladies, as well as lazy farmers’ and tradesmen’s wives. There is no state of life in which industry in the wife is not necessary to the happiness and prosperity of the family, at the head of the household affairs of which she is placed. If she be lazy, there will be lazy servants, and, which is a great deal worse, children habitually lazy: every thing, however necessary to be done, will be put off to the last moment: then it will be done badly, and, in many cases, not at all: the dinner will be too late; the journey or the visit will be tardy; inconveniencies of all sorts will be continually arising: there will always be a heavy arrear of things unperformed; and this, even amongst the most wealthy of all, is a great curse; for, if they have no business imposed upon them by necessity, they make business for themselves; life would be unbearable without it: and therefore a lazy woman must always be a curse, be her rank or station what it may.

102. But, who is to tell whether a girl will make an industrious woman? How is the purblind lover especially, to be able to ascertain whether she, whose smiles and dimples and bewitching lips have half bereft him of his senses; how is he to be able to judge, from any thing that he can see, whether the beloved object will be industrious or lazy? Why, it is very difficult: it is a matter that reason has very little to do with; but there are, nevertheless, certain outward and visible signs, from which a man, not wholly deprived of the use of his reason, may form a pretty accurate judgment as to this matter. It was a story in Philadelphia, some years ago, that a young man, who was courting one of three sisters, happened to be on a visit to her, when all the three were present, and when one said to the others, ’I wonder where our needle is.’ Upon which he withdrew, as soon as was consistent with the rules of politeness, resolved never to think more of a girl who possessed a needle only in partnership, and who, it appeared, was not too well informed as to the place where even that share was deposited.

103. This was, to be sure, a very flagrant instance of a want of industry; for, if the third part of the use of a needle satisfied her when single, it was reasonable to anticipate that marriage would banish that useful implement altogether. But such instances are seldom suffered to come in contact with the eyes and ears of the lover, to disguise all defects from whom is the great business, not only of the girl herself, but of her whole family. There are, however, certain outward signs, which, if attended to with care, will serve as pretty sure guides. And, first, if you find the tongue lazy, you may be nearly certain that the hands and feet are the same. By laziness of the tongue I do not mean silence; I do not mean an absence of talk, for that is, in most cases, very good; but, I mean, a slow and soft utterance; a sort of sighing out of the words instead of speaking them; a sort of letting the sounds fall out, as if the party were sick at stomach. The pronunciation of an industrious person is generally quick, distinct, and the voice, if not strong, firm at the least. Not masculine; as feminine as possible; not a croak nor a bawl, but a quick, distinct, and sound voice. Nothing is much more disgusting than what the sensible country people call a maw-mouthed woman. A maw-mouthed man is bad enough: he is sure to be a lazy fellow: but, a woman of this description, in addition to her laziness, soon becomes the most disgusting of mates. In this whole world nothing is much more hateful than a female’s under jaw, lazily moving up and down, and letting out a long string of half-articulate sounds. It is impossible for any man, who has any spirit in him, to love such a woman for any length of time.

104. Look a little, also, at the labours of the teeth, for these correspond with those of the other members of the body, and with the operations of the mind. ’Quick at meals, quick at work,’ is a saying as old as the hills, in this, the most industrious nation upon earth; and never was there a truer saying. But fashion comes in here, and decides that you shall not be quick at meals; that you shall sit and be carrying on the affair of eating for an hour, or more. Good God! what have I not suffered on this account! However, though she must sit as long as the rest, and though she must join in the performance (for it is a real performance) unto the end of the last scene, she cannot make her teeth abandon their character. She may, and must, suffer the slice to linger on the plate, and must make the supply slow, in order to fill up the time; but when she does bite, she cannot well disguise what nature has taught her to do; and you may be assured, that if her jaws move in slow time, and if she rather squeeze than bite the food; if she so deal with it as to leave you in doubt as to whether she mean finally to admit or reject it; if she deal with it thus, set her down as being, in her very nature, incorrigibly lazy. Never mind the pieces of needle-work, the tambouring, the maps of the world made by her needle. Get to see her at work upon a mutton chop, or a bit of bread and cheese; and, if she deal quickly with these, you have a pretty good security for that activity, that stirring industry, without which a wife is a burden instead of being a help. And, as to love, it cannot live for more than a month or two (in the breast of a man of spirit) towards a lazy woman.

105. Another mark of industry is, a quick step, and a somewhat heavy tread, showing that the foot comes down with a hearty good will; and if the body lean a little forward, and the eyes keep steadily in the same direction, while the feet are going, so much the better, for these discover earnestness to arrive at the intended point. I do not like, and I never liked, your sauntering, soft-stepping girls, who move as if they were perfectly indifferent as to the result; and, as to the love part of the story, whoever expects ardent and lasting affection from one of these sauntering girls, will, when too late, find his mistake: the character runs the same all the way through; and no man ever yet saw a sauntering girl, who did not, when married, make a mawkish wife, and a cold-hearted mother; cared very little for either by husband or children; and, of course, having no store of those blessings which are the natural resources to apply to in sickness and in old age.

106. Early-rising is another mark of industry; and though, in the higher situations of life, it may be of no importance in a mere pecuniary point of view, it is, even there, of importance in other respects; for it is, I should imagine, pretty difficult to keep love alive towards a woman who never sees the dew, never beholds the rising sun, and who constantly comes directly from a reeking bed to the breakfast table, and there chews about, without appetite, the choicest morsels of human food. A man might, perhaps, endure this for a month or two, without being disgusted; but that is ample allowance of time. And, as to people in the middle rank of life, where a living and a provision for children is to be sought by labour of some sort or other, late rising in the wife is certain ruin; and, never was there yet an early-rising wife, who had been a late-rising girl. If brought up to late rising, she will like it; it will be her habit; she will, when married, never want excuses for indulging in the habit; at first she will be indulged without bounds; to make a change afterwards will be difficult; it will be deemed a wrong done to her; she will ascribe it to diminished affection; a quarrel must ensue, or, the husband must submit to be ruined, or, at the very least, to see half the fruit of his labour snored and lounged away. And, is this being rigid? Is it being harsh; is it being hard upon women? Is it the offspring of the frigid severity of age? It is none of these: it arises from an ardent desire to promote the happiness, and to add to the natural, legitimate, and salutary influence, of the female sex. The tendency of this advice is to promote the preservation of their health; to prolong the duration of their beauty; to cause them to be beloved to the last day of their lives; and to give them, during the whole of those lives, weight and consequence, of which laziness would render them wholly unworthy.

107. FRUGALITY. This means the contrary of extravagance. It does not mean stinginess; it does not mean a pinching of the belly, nor a stripping of the back; but it means an abstaining from all unnecessary expenditure, and all unnecessary use, of goods of any and of every sort; and a quality of great importance it is, whether the rank in life be high or low. Some people are, indeed, so rich, they have such an overabundance of money and goods, that how to get rid of them would, to a looker-on, seem to be their only difficulty. But while the inconvenience of even these immense masses is not too great to be overcome by a really extravagant woman, who jumps with joy at a basket of strawberries at a guinea an ounce, and who would not give a straw for green peas later in the year than January; while such a dame would lighten the bags of a loan-monger, or shorten the rent-roll of half-a-dozen peerages amalgamated into one possession, she would, with very little study and application of her talent, send a nobleman of ordinary estate to the poor-house or the pension list, which last may be justly regarded as the poor-book of the aristocracy. How many noblemen and gentlemen, of fine estates, have been ruined and degraded by the extravagance of their wives! More frequently by their own extravagance, perhaps; but, in numerous instances, by that of those whose duty it is to assist in upholding their stations by husbanding their fortunes.

108. If this be the case amongst the opulent, who have estates to draw upon, what must be the consequences of a want of frugality in the middle and lower ranks of life? Here it must be fatal, and especially amongst that description of persons whose wives have, in many cases, the receiving as well as the expending of money. In such a case, there wants nothing but extravagance in the wife to make ruin as sure as the arrival of old age. To obtain security against this is very difficult; yet, if the lover be not quite blind, he may easily discover a propensity towards extravagance. The object of his addresses will, nine times out of ten, not be the manager of a house; but she must have her dress, and other little matters under her control. If she be costly in these; if, in these, she step above her rank, or even to the top of it; if she purchase all she is able to purchase, and prefer the showy to the useful, the gay and the fragile to the less sightly and more durable, he may be sure that the disposition will cling to her through life. If he perceive in her a taste for costly food, costly furniture, costly amusements; if he find her love of gratification to be bounded only by her want of means; if he find her full of admiration of the trappings of the rich, and of desire to be able to imitate them, he may be pretty sure that she will not spare his purse, when once she gets her hand into it; and, therefore, if he can bid adieu to her charms, the sooner he does it the better.

109. The outward and visible and vulgar signs of extravagance are rings, broaches, bracelets, buckles, necklaces, diamonds (real or mock), and, in short, all the hard-ware which women put upon their persons. These things may be proper enough in palaces, or in scenes resembling palaces; but, when they make their appearance amongst people in the middle rank of life, where, after all, they only serve to show that poverty in the parties which they wish to disguise; when the nasty, mean, tawdry things make their appearance in this rank of life, they are the sure indications of a disposition that will always be straining at what it can never attain. To marry a girl of this disposition is really self-destruction. You never can have either property or peace. Earn her a horse to ride, she will want a gig: earn the gig, she will want a chariot: get her that, she will long for a coach and four: and, from stage to stage, she will torment you to the end of her or your days; for, still there will be somebody with a finer equipage than you can give her; and, as long as this is the case, you will never have rest. Reason would tell her, that she could never be at the top; that she must stop at some point short of that; and that, therefore, all expenses in the rivalship are so much thrown away. But, reason and broaches and bracelets do not go in company: the girl who has not the sense to perceive that her person is disfigured, and not beautified, by parcels of brass and tin (for they are generally little better) and other hard-ware, stuck about her body; the girl that is so foolish as not to perceive, that, when silks and cottons and cambrics, in their neatest form, have done their best, nothing more is to be done; the girl that cannot perceive this is too great a fool to be trusted with the purse of any man.

110. CLEANLINESS. This is a capital ingredient; for there never yet was, and there never will be, love of long duration, sincere and ardent love, in any man, towards a ’filthy mate.’ I mean any man in England, or in those parts of America where the people have descended from the English. I do not say, that there are not men enough, even in England, to live peaceably and even contentedly, with dirty, sluttish women; for, there are some who seem to like the filth well enough. But what I contend for is this: that there never can exist, for any length of time, ardent affection in any man towards a woman who is filthy either in her person, or in her house affairs. Men may be careless as to their own persons; they may, from the nature of their business, or from their want of time to adhere to neatness in dress, be slovenly in their own dress and habits; but, they do not relish this in their wives, who must still have charms; and charms and filth do not go together.

111. It is not dress that the husband wants to be perpetual: it is not finery; but cleanliness in every thing. The French women dress enough, especially when they sally forth. My excellent neighbour, Mr. JOHN TREDWELL, of Long Island, used to say, that the French were ’pigs in the parlour, and peacocks on the promenade;’ an alliteration which ’CANNING’S SELF’ might have envied! This occasional cleanliness is not the thing that an English or an American husband wants: he wants it always; indoors as well as out; by night as well as by day; on the floor as well as on the table; and, however he may grumble about the ’fuss’ and the ’expense’ of it, he would grumble more if he had it not. I once saw a picture representing the amusements of Portuguese Lovers; that is to say, three or four young men, dressed in gold or silver laced clothes, each having a young girl, dressed like a princess, and affectionately engaged in hunting down and killing the vermin in his head! This was, perhaps, an exaggeration; but that it should have had the shadow of foundation, was enough to fill me with contempt for the whole nation.

112. The signs of cleanliness are, in the first place, a clean skin. An English girl will hardly let her lover see the stale dirt between her fingers, as I have many times seen it between those of French women, and even ladies, of all ages. An English girl will have her face clean, to be sure, if there be soap and water within her reach; but, get a glance, just a glance, at her poll, if you have any doubt upon the subject; and, if you find there, or behind the ears, what the Yorkshire people call grime, the sooner you cease your visits the better. I hope, now, that no young woman will be offended at this, and think me too severe on her sex. I am only saying, I am only telling the women, that which all men think; and, it is a decided advantage to them to be fully informed of our thoughts on the subject. If any one, who shall read this, find, upon self-examination, that she is defective in this respect, there is plenty of time for correcting the defect.

113. In the dress you can, amongst rich people, find little whereon to form a judgment as to cleanliness, because they have not only the dress prepared for them, but put upon them into the bargain. But, in the middle rank of life, the dress is a good criterion in two respects: first, as to its colour; for, if the white be a sort of yellow, cleanly hands would have been at work to prevent that. A white-yellow cravat, or shirt, on a man, speaks, at once, the character of his wife; and, be you assured, that she will not take with your dress pains which she has never taken with her own. Then, the manner of putting on the dress is no bad foundation for judging. If it be careless, slovenly, if it do not fit properly, no matter for its mean quality: mean as it may be, it may be neatly and trimly put on; and, if it be not, take care of yourself; for, as you will soon find to your cost, a sloven in one thing is a sloven in all things. The country-people judge greatly from the state of the covering of the ancles and, if that be not clean and tight, they conclude, that all out of sight is not what it ought to be. Look at the shoes! If they be trodden on one side, loose on the foot, or run down at the heel, it is a very bad sign; and, as to slip-shod, though at coming down in the morning and even before day-light, make up your mind to a rope, rather than to live with a slip-shod wife.

114. Oh! how much do women lose by inattention to these matters! Men, in general, say nothing about it to their wives; but they think about it; they envy their luckier neighbours; and in numerous cases, consequences the most serious arise from this apparently trifling cause. Beauty is valuable; it is one of the ties, and a strong tie too; that, however, cannot last to old age; but, the charm of cleanliness never ends but with life itself. I dismiss this part of my subject with a quotation from my ’YEAR’S RESIDENCE IN AMERICA,’ containing words which I venture to recommend to every young woman to engrave on her heart: ’The sweetest flowers, when they become putrid, stink the most; and a nasty woman is the nastiest thing in nature.’

115. KNOWLEDGE OF DOMESTIC AFFAIRS. Without more or less of this knowledge, a lady, even the wife of a peer, is but a poorish thing. It was the fashion, in former times, for ladies to understand a great deal about these affairs, and it would be very hard to make me believe that this did not tend to promote the interests and honour of their husbands. The affairs of a great family never can be well managed, if left wholly to hirelings; and there are many parts of these affairs in which it would be unseemly for the husband to meddle. Surely, no lady can be too high in rank to make it proper for her to be well acquainted with the characters and general demeanour of all the female servants. To receive and give them characters is too much to be left to a servant, however good, and of service however long. Much of the ease and happiness of the great and rich must depend on the character of those by whom they are served: they live under the same roof with them; they are frequently the children of their tenants, or poorer neighbours; the conduct of their whole lives must be influenced by the examples and precepts which they here imbibe; and when ladies consider how much more weight there must be in one word from them than in ten thousand words from a person who, call her what you like, is still a fellow-servant, it does appear strange that they should forego the performance of this at once important and pleasing part of their duty. It was from the mansions of noblemen and gentlemen, and not from boarding-schools, that farmers and tradesmen formerly took their wives; and though these days are gone, with little chance of returning, there is still something left for ladies to do in checking that torrent of immorality which is now crowding the streets with prostitutes and cramming the jails with thieves.

116. I am, however, addressing myself, in this work, to persons in the middle rank of life; and here a knowledge of domestic affairs is so necessary in every wife, that the lover ought to have it continually in his eye. Not only a knowledge of these affairs; not only to know how things ought to be done, but how to do them; not only to know what ingredients ought to be put into a pie or a pudding, but to be able to make the pie or the pudding. Young people, when they come together, ought not, unless they have fortunes, or are in a great way of business, to think about servants! Servants for what! To help them to eat and drink and sleep? When children come, there must be some help in a farmer’s or tradesman’s house; but until then, what call for a servant in a house, the master of which has to earn every mouthful that is consumed?

117. I shall, when I come to address myself to the husband, have much more to say upon this subject of keeping servants; but, what the lover, if he be not quite blind, has to look to, is, that his intended wife know how to do the work of a house, unless he have fortune sufficient to keep her like a lady. ’Eating and drinking,’ as I observe in COTTAGE ECONOMY, came three times every day; they must come; and, however little we may, in the days of our health and vigour, care about choice food and about cookery, we very soon get tired of heavy or burnt bread and of spoiled joints of meat: we bear them for a time, or for two, perhaps; but, about the third time, we lament inwardly; about the fifth time, it must be an extraordinary honey-moon that will keep us from complaining: if the like continue for a month or two, we begin to repent, and then adieu to all our anticipated delights. We discover, when it is too late, that we have not got a help-mate, but a burden; and, the fire of love being damped, the unfortunately educated creature, whose parents are more to blame than she is, is, unless she resolve to learn her duty, doomed to lead a life very nearly approaching to that of misery; for, however considerate the husband, he never can esteem her as he would have done, had she been skilled and able in domestic affairs.

118. The mere manual performance of domestic labours is not, indeed, absolutely necessary in the female head of the family of professional men, such as lawyers, doctors, and parsons; but, even here, and also in the case of great merchants and of gentlemen living on their fortunes, surely the head of the household ought to be able to give directions as to the purchasing of meat, salting meat, making bread, making preserves of all sorts, and ought to see the things done, or that they be done. She ought to take care that food be well cooked, drink properly prepared and kept; that there be always a sufficient supply; that there be good living without waste; and that, in her department, nothing shall be seen inconsistent with the rank, station, and character of her husband, who, if he have a skilful and industrious wife, will, unless he be of a singularly foolish turn, gladly leave all these things to her absolute dominion, controlled only by the extent of the whole expenditure, of which he must be the best, and, indeed, the sole, judge.

119. But, in a farmer’s or a tradesman’s family, the manual performance is absolutely necessary, whether there be servants or not. No one knows how to teach another so well as one who has done, and can do, the thing himself. It was said of a famous French commander, that, in attacking an enemy, he did not say to his men ’go on,’ but ’come on;’ and, whoever have well observed the movements of servants, must know what a prodigious difference there is in the effect of the words, go and come. A very good rule would be, to have nothing to eat, in a farmer’s or tradesman’s house, that the mistress did not know how to prepare and to cook; no pudding, tart, pie or cake, that she did not know how to make. Never fear the toil to her: exercise is good for health; and without health there is no beauty; a sick beauty may excite pity, but pity is a short-lived passion. Besides, what is the labour in such a case? And how many thousands of ladies, who loll away the day, would give half their fortunes for that sound sleep which the stirring house-wife seldom fails to enjoy.

120. Yet, if a young farmer or tradesman marry a girl, who has been brought up to play music, to what is called draw, to sing, to waste paper, pen and ink, in writing long and half romantic letters, and to see shows, and plays, and read novels; if a young man do marry such an unfortunate young creature, let him bear the consequences with temper; let him be just; and justice will teach him to treat her with great indulgence; to endeavour to cause her to learn her business as a wife; to be patient with her; to reflect that he has taken her, being apprised of her inability; to bear in mind, that he was, or seemed to be, pleased with her showy and useless acquirements; and that, when the gratification of his passion has been accomplished, he is unjust and cruel and unmanly, if he turn round upon her, and accuse her of a want of that knowledge, which he well knew that she did not possess.

121. For my part, I do not know, nor can I form an idea of, a more unfortunate being than a girl with a mere boarding-school education, and without a fortune to enable her to keep a servant, when married. Of what use are her accomplishments? Of what use her music, her drawing, and her romantic epistles? If she be good in her nature, the first little faint cry of her first baby drives all the tunes and all the landscapes and all the Clarissa Harlowes out of her head for ever. I once saw a very striking instance of this sort. It was a climb-over-the-wall match, and I gave the bride away, at St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster, the pair being as handsome a pair as ever I saw in my life. Beauty, however, though in double quantity, would not pay the baker and butcher; and, after an absence of little better than a year, I found the husband in prison for debt; but I there found also his wife, with her baby, and she, who had never, before her marriage, known what it was to get water to wash her own hands, and whose talk was all about music, and the like, was now the cheerful sustainer of her husband, and the most affectionate of mothers. All the music and all the drawing, and all the plays and romances were gone to the winds! The husband and baby had fairly supplanted them; and even this prison-scene was a blessing, as it gave her, at this early stage, an opportunity of proving her devotion to her husband, who, though I have not seen him for about fifteen years, he being in a part of America which I could not reach when last there, has, I am sure, amply repaid her for that devotion. They have now a numerous family (not less than twelve children, I believe), and she is, I am told, a most excellent and able mistress of a respectable house.

122. But, this is a rare instance: the husband, like his countrymen in general, was at once brave, humane, gentle, and considerate, and the love was so sincere and ardent, on both sides, that it made losses and sufferings appear as nothing. When I, in a sort of half-whisper, asked Mrs. DICKENS where her piano was, she smiled, and turned her face towards her baby, that was sitting on her knee; as much as to say, ’This little fellow has beaten the piano;’ and, if what I am now writing should ever have the honour to be read by her, let it be the bearer of a renewed expression of my admiration of her conduct, and of that regard for her kind and sensible husband, which time and distance have not in the least diminished, and which will be an inmate of my heart until it shall cease to beat.

123. The like of this is, however, not to be expected: no man ought to think that he has even a chance of it: besides, the husband was, in this case, a man of learning and of great natural ability: he has not had to get his bread by farming or trade; and, in all probability, his wife has had the leisure to practise those acquirements which she possessed at the time of her marriage. But, can this be the case with the farmer or the tradesman’s wife? She has to help to earn a provision for her children; or, at the least, to help to earn a store for sickness or old age. She, therefore, ought to be qualified to begin, at once, to assist her husband in his earnings: the way in which she can most efficiently assist, is by taking care of his property; by expending his money to the greatest advantage; by wasting nothing; by making the table sufficiently abundant with the least expense. And how is she to do these things, unless she have been brought up to understand domestic affairs? How is she to do these things, if she have been taught to think these matters beneath her study? How is any man to expect her to do these things, if she have been so bred up as to make her habitually look upon them as worthy the attention of none but low and ignorant women?

124. Ignorant, indeed! Ignorance consists in a want of knowledge of those things which your calling or state of life naturally supposes you to understand. A ploughman is not an ignorant man because he does not know how to read: if he knows how to plough, he is not to be called an ignorant man; but, a wife may be justly called an ignorant woman, if she does not know how to provide a dinner for her husband. It is cold comfort for a hungry man, to tell him how delightfully his wife plays and sings: lovers may live on very aërial diet; but husbands stand in need of the solids; and young women may take my word for it, that a constantly clean board, well cooked victuals, a house in order, and a cheerful fire, will do more in preserving a husband’s heart, than all the ’accomplishments,’ taught in all the ’establishments’ in the world.

125. GOOD TEMPER. This is a very difficult thing to ascertain beforehand. Smiles are so cheap; they are so easily put on for the occasion; and, besides, the frowns are, according to the lover’s whim, interpreted into the contrary. By ’good temper,’ I do not mean easy temper, a serenity which nothing disturbs, for that is a mark of laziness. Sulkiness, if you be not too blind to perceive it, is a temper to be avoided by all means. A sulky man is bad enough; what, then, must be a sulky woman, and that woman a wife; a constant inmate, a companion day and night! Only think of the delight of sitting at the same table, and sleeping in the same bed, for a week, and not exchange a word all the while! Very bad to be scolding for such a length of time; but this is far better than the sulks. If you have your eyes, and look sharp, you will discover symptoms of this, if it unhappily exist. She will, at some time or other, show it towards some one or other of the family; or, perhaps, towards yourself; and you may be quite sure that, in this respect, marriage will not mend her. Sulkiness arises from capricious displeasure, displeasure not founded in reason. The party takes offence unjustifiably; is unable to frame a complaint, and therefore expresses displeasure by silence. The remedy for sulkiness is, to suffer it to take its full swing; but it is better not to have the disease in your house; and to be married to it is little short of madness.

126. Querulousness is a great fault. No man, and, especially, no woman, likes to hear eternal plaintiveness. That she complain, and roundly complain, of your want of punctuality, of your coolness, of your neglect, of your liking the company of others: these are all very well, more especially as they are frequently but too just. But an everlasting complaining, without rhyme or reason, is a bad sign. It shows want of patience, and, indeed, want of sense. But, the contrary of this, a cold indifference, is still worse. ’When will you come again? You can never find time to come here. You like any company better than mine.’ These, when groundless, are very teasing, and demonstrate a disposition too full of anxiousness; but, from a girl who always receives you with the same civil smile, lets you, at your own good pleasure, depart with the same; and who, when you take her by the hand, holds her cold fingers as straight as sticks, I say (or should if I were young), God, in his mercy, preserve me!

127. Pertinacity is a very bad thing in anybody, and especially in a young woman; and it is sure to increase in force with the age of the party. To have the last word is a poor triumph; but with some people it is a species of disease of the mind. In a wife it must be extremely troublesome; and, if you find an ounce of it in the maid, it will become a pound in the wife. An eternal disputer is a most disagreeable companion; and where young women thrust their say into conversations carried on by older persons, give their opinions in a positive manner, and court a contest of the tongue, those must be very bold men who will encounter them as wives.

128. Still, of all the faults as to temper, your melancholy ladies have the worst, unless you have the same mental disease. Most wives are, at times, misery-makers; but these carry it on as a regular trade. They are always unhappy about something, either past, present, or to come. Both arms full of children is a pretty efficient remedy in most cases; but, if the ingredients be wanting, a little want, a little real trouble, a little genuine affliction must, if you would effect a cure, be resorted to. But, this is very painful to a man of any feeling; and, therefore, the best way is to avoid a connexion, which is to give you a life of wailing and sighs.

129. BEAUTY. Though I have reserved this to the last of the things to be desired in a wife, I by no means think it the last in point of importance. The less favoured part of the sex say, that ’beauty is but skin-deep;’ and this is very true; but, it is very agreeable, though, for all that. Pictures are only paint-deep, or pencil-deep; but we admire them, nevertheless. "Handsome is that handsome does," used to say to me an old man, who had marked me out for his not over handsome daughter. ’Please your eye and plague your heart’ is an adage that want of beauty invented, I dare say, more than a thousand years ago. These adages would say, if they had but the courage, that beauty is inconsistent with chastity, with sobriety of conduct, and with all the female virtues. The argument is, that beauty exposes the possessor to greater temptation than women not beautiful are exposed to; and that, therefore, their fall is more probable. Let us see a little how this matter stands.

130. It is certainly true, that pretty girls will have more, and more ardent, admirers than ugly ones; but, as to the temptation when in their unmarried state, there are few so very ugly as to be exposed to no temptation at all; and, which is the most likely to resist; she who has a choice of lovers, or she who if she let the occasion slip may never have it again? Which of the two is most likely to set a high value upon her reputation, she whom all beholders admire, or she who is admired, at best, by mere chance? And as to women in the married state, this argument assumes, that, when they fall, it is from their own vicious disposition; when the fact is, that, if you search the annals of conjugal infidelity, you will find, that, nine times out of ten, the fault is in the husband. It is his neglect, his flagrant disregard, his frosty indifference, his foul example; it is to these that, nine times out of ten, he owes the infidelity of his wife; and, if I were to say ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the facts, if verified, would, I am certain, bear me out. And whence this neglect, this disregard, this frosty indifference; whence this foul example? Because it is easy, in so many cases, to find some woman more beautiful than the wife. This is no justification for the husband to plead; for he has, with his eyes open, made a solemn contract: if he have not beauty enough to please him, he should have sought it in some other woman: if, as is frequently the case, he have preferred rank or money to beauty, he is an unprincipled man, if he do any thing to make her unhappy who has brought him the rank or the money. At any rate, as conjugal infidelity is, in so many cases; as it is generally caused by the want of affection and due attention in the husband, it follows, of course, that it must more frequently happen in the case of ugly than in that of handsome women.

131. In point of dress, nothing need be said to convince any reasonable man, that beautiful women will be less expensive in this respect than women of a contrary description. Experience teaches us, that ugly women are always the most studious about their dress; and, if we had never observed upon the subject, reason would tell us, that it must be so. Few women are handsome without knowing it; and if they know that their features naturally attract admiration, will they desire to draw it off, and to fix it on lace and silks and jewels?

132. As to manners and temper there are certainly some handsome women who are conceited and arrogant; but, as they have all the best reasons in the world for being pleased with themselves, they afford you the best chance of general good humour; and this good humour is a very valuable commodity in the married state. Some that are called handsome, and that are such at the first glance, are dull, inanimate things, that might as well have been made of wax, or of wood. But, the truth is, that this is not beauty, for this is not to be found only in the form of the features, but in the movements of them also. Besides, here nature is very impartial; for she gives animation promiscuously to the handsome as well as to the ugly; and the want of this in the former is surely as bearable as in the latter.

133. But, the great use of female beauty, the great practical advantage of it is, that it naturally and unavoidably tends to keep the husband in good humour with himself, to make him, to use the dealer’s phrase, pleased with his bargain. When old age approaches, and the parties have become endeared to each other by a long series of joint cares and interests, and when children have come and bound them together by the strongest ties that nature has in store; at this age the features and the person are of less consequence; but, in the young days of matrimony, when the roving eye of the bachelor is scarcely become steady in the head of the husband, it is dangerous for him to see, every time he stirs out, a face more captivating than that of the person to whom he is bound for life. Beauty is, in some degree, a matter of taste: what one man admires, another does not; and it is fortunate for us that it is thus. But still there are certain things that all men admire; and a husband is always pleased when he perceives that a portion, at least, of these things are in his own possession: he takes this possession as a compliment to himself: there must, he will think the world will believe, have been some merit in him, some charm, seen or unseen, to have caused him to be blessed with the acquisition.

134. And then there arise so many things, sickness, misfortune in business, losses, many many things, wholly unexpected; and, there are so many circumstances, perfectly nameless, to communicate to the new-married man the fact, that it is not a real angel of whom he has got the possession; there are so many things of this sort, so many and such powerful dampers of the passions, and so many incentives to cool reflection; that it requires something, and a good deal too, to keep the husband in countenance in this his altered and enlightened state. The passion of women does not cool so soon: the lamp of their love burns more steadily, and even brightens as it burns: and, there is, the young man may be assured, a vast difference in the effect of the fondness of a pretty woman and that of one of a different description; and, let reason and philosophy say what they will, a man will come down stairs of a morning better pleased after seeing the former, than he would after seeing the latter, in her night-cap.

135. To be sure, when a man has, from whatever inducement, once married a woman, he is unjust and cruel if he even slight her on account of her want of beauty, and, if he treat her harshly, on this account, he is a brute. But, it requires a greater degree of reflection and consideration than falls to the lot of men in general to make them act with justice in such a case; and, therefore, the best way is to guard, if you can, against the temptation to commit such injustice, which is to be done in no other way, than by not marrying any one that you do not think handsome.

136. I must not conclude this address to THE LOVER without something on the subject of seduction and inconstancy. In, perhaps, nineteen cases out of twenty, there is, in the unfortunate cases of illicit gratification, no seduction at all, the passion, the absence of virtue, and the crime, being all mutual. But, there are other cases of a very different description; and where a man goes coolly and deliberately to work, first to gain and rivet the affections of a young girl, then to take advantage of those affections to accomplish that which he knows must be her ruin, and plunge her into misery for life; when a man does this merely for the sake of a momentary gratification, he must be either a selfish and unfeeling brute, unworthy of the name of man, or he must have a heart little inferior, in point of obduracy, to that of the murderer. Let young women, however, be aware; let them be well aware, that few, indeed, are the cases in which this apology can possibly avail them. Their character is not solely theirs, but belongs, in part, to their family and kindred. They may, in the case contemplated, be objects of compassion with the world; but what contrition, what repentance, what remorse, what that even the tenderest benevolence can suggest, is to heal the wounded hearts of humbled, disgraced, but still affectionate, parents, brethren and sisters?

137. As to constancy in Lovers, though I do not approve of the saying, ’At lovers’ lies Jove laughs;’ yet, when people are young, one object may supplant another in their affections, not only without criminality in the party experiencing the change, but without blame; and it is honest, and even humane, to act upon the change; because it would be both foolish and cruel to marry one girl while you liked another better: and the same holds good with regard to the other sex. Even when marriage has been promised, and that, too, in the most solemn manner, it is better for both parties to break off, than to be coupled together with the reluctant assent of either; and I have always thought, that actions for damages, on this score, if brought by the girl, show a want of delicacy as well as of spirit; and, if brought by the man, excessive meanness. Some damage may, indeed, have been done to the complaining party; but no damage equal to what that party would have sustained from a marriage, to which the other party would have yielded by a sort of compulsion, producing to almost a certainty what Hogarth, in his Marriage à la Mode, most aptly typifies by two curs, of different sexes, fastened together by what sportsmen call couples, pulling different ways, and snarling and barking and foaming like furies.

138. But when promises have been made to a young woman; when they have been relied on for any considerable time; when it is manifest that her peace and happiness, and, perhaps, her life, depend upon their fulfilment; when things have been carried to this length, the change in the Lover ought to be announced in the manner most likely to make the disappointment as supportable as the case will admit of; for, though it is better to break the promise than to marry one while you like another better; though it is better for both parties, you have no right to break the heart of her who has, and that, too, with your accordance, and, indeed, at your instigation, or, at least, by your encouragement, confided it to your fidelity. You cannot help your change of affections; but you can help making the transfer in such a way as to cause the destruction, or even probable destruction, nay, if it were but the deep misery, of her, to gain whose heart you had pledged your own. You ought to proceed by slow degrees; you ought to call time to your aid in executing the painful task; you ought scrupulously to avoid every thing calculated to aggravate the sufferings of the disconsolate party.

139. A striking, a monstrous, instance of conduct the contrary of this has recently been placed upon the melancholy records of the Coroner of Middlesex; which have informed an indignant public, that a young man, having first secured the affections of a virtuous young woman, next promised her marriage, then caused the banns to be published, and then, on the very day appointed for the performance of the ceremony, married another woman, in the same church; and this, too, without, as he avowed, any provocation, and without the smallest intimation or hint of his intention to the disappointed party, who, unable to support existence under a blow so cruel, put an end to that existence by the most deadly and the swiftest poison. If any thing could wipe from our country the stain of having given birth to a monster so barbarous as this, it would be the abhorrence of him which the jury expressed; and which, from every tongue, he ought to hear to the last moment of his life.

140. Nor has a man any right to sport with the affections of a young woman, though he stop short of positive promises. Vanity is generally the tempter in this case; a desire to be regarded as being admired by the women: a very despicable species of vanity, but frequently greatly mischievous, notwithstanding. You do not, indeed, actually, in so many words, promise to marry; but the general tenor of your language and deportment has that meaning; you know that your meaning is so understood; and if you have not such meaning; if you be fixed by some previous engagement with, or greater liking for, another; if you know you are here sowing the seeds of disappointment; and if you, keeping your previous engagement or greater liking a secret, persevere, in spite of the admonitions of conscience, you are guilty of deliberate deception, injustice and cruelty: you make to God an ungrateful return for those endowments which have enabled you to achieve this inglorious and unmanly triumph; and if, as is frequently the case, you glory in such triumph, you may have person, riches, talents to excite envy; but every just and humane man will abhor your heart.

141. There are, however, certain cases in which you deceive, or nearly deceive, yourself; cases in which you are, by degrees and by circumstances, deluded into something very nearly resembling sincere love for a second object, the first still, however, maintaining her ground in your heart; cases in which you are not actuated by vanity, in which you are not guilty of injustice and cruelty; but cases in which you, nevertheless, do wrong: and as I once did a wrong of this sort myself, I will here give a history of it, as a warning to every young man who shall read this little book; that being the best and, indeed, the only atonement, that I can make, or ever could have made, for this only serious sin that I ever committed against the female sex.

142. The Province of New Brunswick, in North America, in which I passed my years from the age of eighteen to that of twenty-six, consists, in general, of heaps of rocks, in the interstices of which grow the pine, the spruce, and various sorts of fir trees, or, where the woods have been burnt down, the bushes of the raspberry or those of the huckleberry. The province is cut asunder lengthwise, by a great river, called the St. John, about two hundred miles in length, and, at half way from the mouth, full a mile wide. Into this main river run innumerable smaller rivers, there called CREEKS. On the sides of these creeks the land is, in places, clear of rocks; it is, in these places, generally good and productive; the trees that grow here are the birch, the maple, and others of the deciduous class; natural meadows here and there present themselves; and some of these spots far surpass in rural beauty any other that my eyes ever beheld; the creeks, abounding towards their sources in water-falls of endless variety, as well in form as in magnitude, and always teeming with fish, while water-fowl enliven their surface, and while wild-pigeons, of the gayest plumage, flutter, in thousands upon thousands, amongst the branches of the beautiful trees, which, sometimes, for miles together, form an arch over the creeks.

143. I, in one of my rambles in the woods, in which I took great delight, came to a spot at a very short distance from the source of one of these creeks. Here was every thing to delight the eye, and especially of one like me, who seem to have been born to love rural life, and trees and plants of all sorts. Here were about two hundred acres of natural meadow, interspersed with patches of maple-trees in various forms and of various extent; the creek (there about thirty miles from its point of joining the St. John) ran down the middle of the spot, which formed a sort of dish, the high and rocky hills rising all round it, except at the outlet of the creek, and these hills crowned with lofty pines: in the hills were the sources of the creek, the waters of which came down in cascades, for any one of which many a nobleman in England would, if he could transfer it, give a good slice of his fertile estate; and in the creek, at the foot of the cascades, there were, in the season, salmon the finest in the world, and so abundant, and so easily taken, as to be used for manuring the land.

144. If nature, in her very best humour, had made a spot for the express purpose of captivating me, she could not have exceeded the efforts which she had here made. But I found something here besides these rude works of nature; I found something in the fashioning of which man had had something to do. I found a large and well-built log dwelling house, standing (in the month of September) on the edge of a very good field of Indian Corn, by the side of which there was a piece of buck-wheat just then mowed. I found a homestead, and some very pretty cows. I found all the things by which an easy and happy farmer is surrounded: and I found still something besides all these; something that was destined to give me a great deal of pleasure and also a great deal of pain, both in their extreme degree; and both of which, in spite of the lapse of forty years, now make an attempt to rush back into my heart.

145. Partly from misinformation, and partly from miscalculation, I had lost my way; and, quite alone, but armed with my sword and a brace of pistols, to defend myself against the bears, I arrived at the log-house in the middle of a moonlight night, the hoar frost covering the trees and the grass. A stout and clamorous dog, kept off by the gleaming of my sword, waked the master of the house, who got up, received me with great hospitality, got me something to eat, and put me into a feather-bed, a thing that I had been a stranger to for some years. I, being very tired, had tried to pass the night in the woods, between the trunks of two large trees, which had fallen side by side, and within a yard of each other. I had made a nest for myself of dry fern, and had made a covering by laying boughs of spruce across the trunks of the trees. But unable to sleep on account of the cold; becoming sick from the great quantity of water that I had drank during the heat of the day, and being, moreover, alarmed at the noise of the bears, and lest one of them should find me in a defenceless state, I had roused myself up, and had crept along as well as I could. So that no hero of eastern romance ever experienced a more enchanting change.

146. I had got into the house of one of those YANKEE LOYALISTS, who, at the close of the revolutionary war (which, until it had succeeded, was called a rebellion) had accepted of grants of land in the King’s Province of New Brunswick; and who, to the great honour of England, had been furnished with all the means of making new and comfortable settlements. I was suffered to sleep till breakfast time, when I found a table, the like of which I have since seen so many in the United States, loaded with good things. The master and the mistress of the house, aged about fifty, were like what an English farmer and his wife were half a century ago. There were two sons, tall and stout, who appeared to have come in from work, and the youngest of whom was about my age, then twenty-three. But there was another member of the family, aged nineteen, who (dressed according to the neat and simple fashion of New England, whence she had come with her parents five or six years before) had her long light-brown hair twisted nicely up, and fastened on the top of her head, in which head were a pair of lively blue eyes, associated with features of which that softness and that sweetness, so characteristic of American girls, were the predominant expressions, the whole being set off by a complexion indicative of glowing health, and forming, figure, movements, and all taken together, an assemblage of beauties, far surpassing any that I had ever seen but once in my life. That once was, too, two years agone; and, in such a case and at such an age, two years, two whole years, is a long, long while! It was a space as long as the eleventh part of my then life! Here was the present against the absent: here was the power of the eyes pitted against that of the memory: here were all the senses up in arms to subdue the influence of the thoughts: here was vanity, here was passion, here was the spot of all spots in the world, and here were also the life, and the manners and the habits and the pursuits that I delighted in: here was every thing that imagination can conceive, united in a conspiracy against the poor little brunette in England! What, then, did I fall in love at once with this bouquet of lilies and roses? Oh! by no means. I was, however, so enchanted with the place; I so much enjoyed its tranquillity, the shade of the maple trees, the business of the farm, the sports of the water and of the woods, that I stayed at it to the last possible minute, promising, at my departure, to come again as often as I possibly could; a promise which I most punctually fulfilled.

147. Winter is the great season for jaunting and dancing (called frolicking) in America. In this Province the river and the creeks were the only roads from settlement to settlement. In summer we travelled in canoes; in winter in sleighs on the ice or snow. During more than two years I spent all the time I could with my Yankee friends: they were all fond of me: I talked to them about country affairs, my evident delight in which they took as a compliment to themselves: the father and mother treated me as one of their children; the sons as a brother; and the daughter, who was as modest and as full of sensibility as she was beautiful, in a way to which a chap much less sanguine than I was would have given the tenderest interpretation; which treatment I, especially in the last-mentioned case, most cordially repaid.

148. It is when you meet in company with others of your own age that you are, in love matters, put, most frequently, to the test, and exposed to detection. The next door neighbour might, in that country, be ten miles off. We used to have a frolic, sometimes at one house and sometimes at another. Here, where female eyes are very much on the alert, no secret can long be kept; and very soon father, mother, brothers and the whole neighbourhood looked upon the thing as certain, not excepting herself, to whom I, however, had never once even talked of marriage, and had never even told her that I loved her. But I had a thousand times done these by implication, taking into view the interpretation that she would naturally put upon my looks, appellations and acts; and it was of this, that I had to accuse myself. Yet I was not a deceiver; for my affection for her was very great: I spent no really pleasant hours but with her: I was uneasy if she showed the slightest regard for any other young man: I was unhappy if the smallest matter affected her health or spirits: I quitted her in dejection, and returned to her with eager delight: many a time, when I could get leave but for a day, I paddled in a canoe two whole succeeding nights, in order to pass that day with her. If this was not love, it was first cousin to it; for as to any criminal intention I no more thought of it, in her case, than if she had been my sister. Many times I put to myself the questions: ’What am I at? Is not this wrong? Why do I go?’ But still I went.

149. Then, further in my excuse, my prior engagement, though carefully left unalluded to by both parties, was, in that thin population, and owing to the singular circumstances of it, and to the great talk that there always was about me, perfectly well known to her and all her family. It was matter of so much notoriety and conversation in the Province, that GENERAL CARLETON (brother of the late Lord Dorchester), who was the Governor when I was there, when he, about fifteen years afterwards, did me the honour, on his return to England, to come and see me at my house in Duke Street, Westminster, asked, before he went away, to see my wife, of whom he had heard so much before her marriage. So that here was no deception on my part: but still I ought not to have suffered even the most distant hope to be entertained by a person so innocent, so amiable, for whom I had so much affection, and to whose heart I had no right to give a single twinge. I ought, from the very first, to have prevented the possibility of her ever feeling pain on my account. I was young, to be sure; but I was old enough to know what was my duty in this case, and I ought, dismissing my own feelings, to have had the resolution to perform it.

150. The last parting came; and now came my just punishment! The time was known to every body, and was irrevocably fixed; for I had to move with a regiment, and the embarkation of a regiment is an epoch in a thinly settled province. To describe this parting would be too painful even at this distant day, and with this frost of age upon my head. The kind and virtuous father came forty miles to see me just as I was going on board in the river. His looks and words I have never forgotten. As the vessel descended, she passed the mouth of that creek which I had so often entered with delight; and though England, and all that England contained, were before me, I lost sight of this creek with an aching heart.

151. On what trifles turn the great events in the life of man! If I had received a cool letter from my intended wife; if I had only heard a rumour of any thing from which fickleness in her might have been inferred; if I had found in her any, even the smallest, abatement of affection; if she had but let go any one of the hundred strings by which she held my heart: if any of these, never would the world have heard of me. Young as I was; able as I was as a soldier; proud as I was of the admiration and commendations of which I was the object; fond as I was, too, of the command, which, at so early an age, my rare conduct and great natural talents had given me; sanguine as was my mind, and brilliant as were my prospects: yet I had seen so much of the meannesses, the unjust partialities, the insolent pomposity, the disgusting dissipations of that way of life, that I was weary of it: I longed, exchanging my fine laced coat for the Yankee farmer’s home-spun, to be where I should never behold the supple crouch of servility, and never hear the hectoring voice of authority, again; and, on the lonely banks of this branch-covered creek, which contained (she out of the question) every thing congenial to my taste and dear to my heart, I, unapplauded, unfeared, unenvied and uncalumniated, should have lived and died.