The question of professions, in as far as they regard
marriage, was only interesting to women until of late days,
but it touches all of us now. Certainly, if I could help it,
I would never marry a wife who wrote. The practice of letters
is miserably harassing to the mind; and after an hour or two's
work, all the more human portion of the author is extinct; he
will bully, backbite, and speak daggers. Music, I hear, is
not much better. But painting, on the contrary, is often
highly sedative; because so much of the labour, after your
picture is once begun, is almost entirely manual, and of that
skilled sort of manual labour which offers a continual series
of successes, and so tickles a man, through his vanity, into
good humour. Alas! in letters there is nothing of this sort.
You may write as beautiful a hand as you will, you have always
something else to think of, and cannot pause to notice your
loops and flourishes; they are beside the mark, and the first
law stationer could put you to the blush. Rousseau, indeed,
made some account of penmanship, even made it a source of
livelihood, when he copied out the HELOISE for DILETTANTE
ladies; and therein showed that strange eccentric prudence
which guided him among so many thousand follies and
insanities. It would be well for all of the GENUS IRRITABILE
thus to add something of skilled labour to intangible brain-
work. To find the right word is so doubtful a success and
lies so near to failure, that there is no satisfaction in a
year of it; but we all know when we have formed a letter
perfectly; and a stupid artist, right or wrong, is almost
equally certain he has found a right tone or a right colour,
or made a dexterous stroke with his brush. And, again,