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 walked 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; and if you are only a man in the
making, you have recognised that yours was quite a special case, and you
yourself not guilty of your own pestiferous career.

Granted, and with all my heart. Let us accept these apologies; let us
agree that you are nobody's enemy but your own; let us agree that you
are a sort of moral cripple, impotent for good; and let us regard you
with the unmingled pity due to such a fate. But there is one thing to
which, on these terms, we can never agree:--we can never agree to have
you marry. What! you have had one life to manage, and have failed so
strangely, and now can see nothing wiser than to conjoin with it the
management of some one else's? Because you have been unfaithful in a
very little, you propose yourself to be a ruler over ten cities. You
strip yourself by such a step of all remaining consolations and excuses.
You are no longer content to be your own enemy; you must be your wife's
also. You have been hitherto in a mere subaltern attitude; dealing cruel
blows about you in life, yet only half responsible, since you came there
by no choice or movement of your own. Now, it appears, you must take
things