for nobody will follow my advice. But the last word is of
more concern. Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts
light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness. They have been so
tried among the inconstant squalls and currents, so often sailed for
islands in the air or lain becalmed with burning heart, that they will
risk all for solid ground below their feet. Desperate pilots, they run
their sea-sick, weary barque upon the dashing rocks. It seems as if
marriage were the royal road through life, and realised, on the instant,
what we have all dreamed on summer Sundays when the bells ring, or at
night when we cannot sleep for the desire of living. They think it will
sober and change them. Like those who join a brotherhood, they fancy it
needs but an act to be out of the coil and clamour for ever. But this is
a wile of the devil's. To the end, spring winds will sow disquietude,
passing faces leave a regret behind them, and the whole world keep
calling and calling in their ears. For marriage is like life in
this--that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.

II

Hope, they say, deserts us at no period of our existence. From first to
last, and in the face of smarting disillusions we continue to expect
good fortune, better health, and better conduct; and that so
confidently, that we judge it needless to deserve them. I think it
improbable that I shall ever write like Shakespeare, conduct an army
like Hannibal, or distinguish myself like Marcus Aurelius in the paths
of virtue; and yet I have my by-days, hope prompting, when I am very
ready to believe that I shall combine all these various excellences in
my own person, and go marching down to posterity with divine honours.
There is nothing so monstrous but we can believe it of ourselves. About
ourselves, about our aspirations and delinquencies, we have dwelt by
choice in a delicious vagueness from our boyhood up. No one will have
forgotten Tom Sawyer's aspiration: "Ah, if he could only die
_temporarily_!" Or, perhaps, better still, the inward resolution of the
two pirates, that "so long as they remained in that business, their
piracies should not again be sullied with the crime of stealing." Here
we recognise the thoughts of our boyhood; and our boyhood ceased,--well,
when?--not, I think, at twenty; nor, perhaps, altogether at twenty-five;
nor yet at thirty; and possibly, to be quite frank, we are still in the
th