simplicity and ease; it offers to bury for ever many aching
preoccupations; it is to afford us unfailing and familiar
company through life; it opens up a smiling prospect of the
blest and passive kind of love, rather than the blessing and
active; it is approached not only through the delights of
courtship, but by a public performance and repeated legal
signatures. A man naturally thinks it will go hard with him
if he cannot be good and fortunate and happy within such
august circumvallations.

And yet there is probably no other act in a man's life so
hot-headed and foolhardy as this one of marriage. For years,
let us suppose, you have been making the most indifferent
business of your career. Your experience has not, we may dare
to say, been more encouraging than Paul's or Horace's; like
them, you have seen and desired the good that you were not
able to accomplish; like them, you have done the evil that you
loathed. You have waked at night in a hot or a cold sweat,
according to your habit of body, remembering with dismal
surprise, your own unpardonable acts and sayings. You have
been sometimes tempted to withdraw entirely from this game of
life; as a man who makes nothing but misses withdraws from
that less dangerous one of billiards. You have fallen back
upon the thought that you yourself most sharply smarted for
your misdemeanours, or, in the old, plaintive phrase, that you
were nobody's enemy but your own. And then you have been made
aware of what was beautiful and amiable, wise and kind, in the
other part of your behaviour; and it seemed as if nothing
could reconcile the contradiction, as indeed nothing can. If
you are a man, you have shut your mouth hard and said nothing;