not wed at all. Marriage, said the famous Marshal Saxe, in effect,
is a state of penance; Rome declares there are seven sacraments, but
there are really only six, because penance and matrimony are one.

Hymen, says Chamfort, comes after love, like smoke after flame. It is
the high sea, observes Heine, for which no compass has yet been
invented. Its melancholy uncertainty is illustrated by the remark of
Samuel Rogers, that it does not matter whom you marry--she will be quite
another woman the next day. It was Rogers, too, who, when he heard of a
certain person's nuptials, declared that if his friends were pleased his
enemies were delighted. Selden's complaint against marriage was that it
is 'a desperate thing,' out of which it is impossible to extract one's
self; but then he lived before the era of Sir Cresswell Cresswell. And
the utmost that the conventional detractor will admit is, that the
institution gives to man two happy hours. 'Cursed be the hour I first
became your wife,' cries the lady in the well-known quotation; to which
her spouse replies that--'That's too bad; you've cursed the only happy
hour we've had.' But Palladas, the Greek, as translated by Mr. J. H.
Merivale, goes a little farther than this, declaring that

'All wives are bad; yet two blest hours they give:
When first they wed, and when they cease to live.'

A favourite notion with the satirists is that marriage is a state of
mutual recrimination. John Heywood has the couplet:

'"Wife, I perceive thy tongue was made at Edgware."
"Yes, sir, and your's made at Rayly, hard by there."'

And this is typical of many another utterance; for example, this:

'Know ye not all, the Scripture saith,
That man and wife are _one_ till death?
But Peter and his scolding wife
Wage such an endless war of strife,
You'd swear, on passing Peter's door,
That man and wife at least were _four_.'

Doctor Johnson, too, draws attention to the fact--if it be one--that all
the reasons which a man and a woman have for remaining in the estate of
matrimony, and the restraints which civilized society imposes to prevent
separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together. Or, as Mr.
William Allingham has, of recent years, more pithily put it:

'If any two can live together well,
'Tis (and yet such things are) a miracle!'

If we are to believe the aforesaid satirists, this is all the fault of
the wives. Now and again one comes across a jest in w