mpany
of a steam-boat, or the party on a railroad, you must adduce in
evidence. They are the best--they are the only judges of what you, in
the ignorance of your heart, have believed a secret for your own
bosom.

Your conduct within-doors is of little moment, so that your bearing
without satisfy the world. What a delightful picture of universal
happiness will England then present to the foreigner who visits our
salons! With what ecstasy will he contemplate the angelic felicity of
conjugal life! Instead of the indignant coldness of a husband,
offended by some casual levity of his wife, he will now redouble his
attentions, and take an opportunity of calling the company to witness
that they live together like turtle-doves. He knows not how soon, if
he mix much in fashionable life, their testimony may avail him; and
the loving smile he throws his spouse across the supper-table is
worth three thousand pounds before any jury in Middlesex.

Romance writers will now lose one stronghold of sentiment. Love in a
cottage will possess as little respect as it ever did attraction for
the world. The pier at Brighton, a Gravesend steamer, Hyde Park on a
Sunday, will be the appropriate spheres for the interchange of
conjugal vows. No absurd notions of solitude will then hold sway.
Alas! how little prophetic spirit is there in poetry! But a few years
ago, and one of our sirens of song said,

"When should lovers breathe their vows?
When should ladies hear them?
When the dew is on the boughs--
When none else is near them."

Not a word of it! The appropriate place is amid the glitter of jewels,
the glare of lamps, the crush of fashion, and the din of conversation.
The private boxes of the opera are even too secluded, and your
happiness is no more genuine, until recognised by society, than is an
exchequer bill with the mere signature of Lord Monteagle.

The benefits of this system will be great. No longer will men be
reduced to the cultivation of those meeker virtues that grace and
adorn life; no more will they study those accomplishments that make
home happy and their hearth cheerful. A winter at Paris and a box at
the Varietes will be more to the purpose. Scribe's farces will teach
them more important lessons, and they will obtain an instructive
example in the last line of a vaudeville, where an injured husband
presents himself at the fall of the curtain, and, as he bows to the
audience, embraces both his wife an