haracter 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