good, "Optimum elige, suave et facile illud faciet consuetudo."*-Younger brothers are commonly fortunate, but seldom or never where the elder are disinherited. †

OF MARRIAGE AND SINGLE LIFE.

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men; which, both in affection and means, have married and endowed the public. Yet it were great reason that those that have children should have greatest care of future times, unto which they know they must transmit their dearest pledges. Some there are, who, though they lead a single life, yet their thoughts do end. with themselves, and account future times impertinences; ‡ ✔ nay, there are some other that account wife and children but as bills of charges; nay more, there are some foolish rich covetous men, that take a pride in having no children, because they may be thought so much the richer; for, perhaps, they have heard some talk, "Such an one is a great

"Select the career which seems best; habit will make it practicable and pleasant."

† According to the English law of primogeniture the oldest son got the lion's share of the father's estate at the latter's death. Sometimes the estate was entailed, i. e. so fixed that it could not be divided up among all the children, or disposed of by sale or by last will, but descended from father to the oldest son, through succeeding generations. When not entailed, the owner could dispose of it by last will, as he might see fit. In the United States the power to entail property has been abolished; if not devised, all children share alike.

Impertinences. A word used in equity pleadings, meaning things irrelevant.

§ Because. In order that.

rich man," and another except to it, "Yea, but he hath a great charge of children; as if it were an abatement to his riches but the most ordinary cause of a single life is liberty, especially in certain self-pleasing and humorous* minds, which are so sensible of every restraint, as they will go near to think their girdles and garters to be bonds and shackles. Unmarried men are best friends, best masters, best servants; but not always best subjects; for they are light to run away; and almost all fugitives are of that condition. A single life doth well with churchmen, for charity will hardly water the ground where it must first fill a pool. † It is indifferent for judges and magistrates; for if they be facile and corrupt, you shall have a servant five times worse than a wife. For soldiers, I find the generals commonly, in their hortatives, ‡ put men in mind of their wives and children; and I think the despising of marriage among

† The celibacy of the priesthood was based upon other grounds. It was a part of the Roman Catholic policy, and necessary to its hierarchy. Its missionary orders could not, it was thought, wed and work. Its monastic orders could not people their cells with wives and children; a nunnery would not resemble its heathen prototype- the temple of vestal virgins-if the sisters in the church took husbands from the world. In a word, the theory was that every religious, from pope to begging friar, from abbess to nun, was wedded to the church and loosed from all family and worldly ties. In the primitive church, when the priesthood of one day might be made the martyrs of the next, when the conversion of Greek and Roman, philosopher and barbarian, was the lifemission of each, marriage and domestic duties were incompatible * with the fulfillment of the higher mission; but when Luther revolutionized a part of the priesthood by his example and writings, the face of society and state of the church had undergone a change. Yet it was some time before the English Church followed in the footsteps of the Lutheran.

"Strike-for your altars and your fires;

Strike- for the green graves of your sires,

God and your native land.”— Marco Bozzaris.

the Turks maketh the vulgar soldier more base. Certainly wife and children are a kind of discipline of humanity; and single men, though they be many times more charitable, because their means are less exhaust,* yet, on the other side, they are more cruel and hard-hearted (good to make severe inquisitors), because their tenderness is not so oft called upon. Grave natures, led by custom, and therefore constant, are commonly loving husbands, as was said of Ulysses, "Vetulam suam prætulit immortalitati." ↑ Chaste women are often proud and froward as presuming upon the merit of their chastity. It is one of the best bonds, both of chastity and obedience, in the wife, if she think her husband wise; which she will never do if she find him jealous. ‡ Wives are young men's mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men's nurses; so as a man may have a quarrel §

† He preferred his aged wife (Penelope) to immortality.

Jealousy is a natural and universal weakness, which is not base, like envy, but is a source of sorrow to its possessor, and if not restrained by reason it becomes an evil passion. In the Song of Solomon it is described as being "cruel as the grave." Shakespeare points the moral of its indulgence in Othello. Milton calls it "the injured lover's hell." Rochefoucauld and Goldsmith defend or apologize for it. The former says: "Jealousy is in some sort just and reasonable, since it only has for its object the preservation of a good which belongs, or which we fancy belongs, to ourselves; while envy, on the contrary, is madness which cannot endure the good of others.” — Maxim 29.

Goldsmith, in "The Good-natured Man," thus defends it: "It is natural to suppose that merit which has made an impression on one's own heart may be powerful over that of another." — Act 1.,

Scene I.

§ Quarrel. Excuse or ground.

In an old scrap-book there are the following lines, said to be inscribed on a tombstone in an old English graveyard:

"Tho' marriage by some is counted a curse,
Three wives did I marry for better or worse:
The first for her person, the second her purse,
The third for warming-pan, doctress and nurse."

to marry when he will: but yet he was reputed one of the wise men, that made answer to the question when a man should marry:—' “A young man not yet, an elder man not at all."* It is often seen, that bad husbands have very good wives; whether it be that it raiseth the price of their husbands' kindness when it comes, or that the wives take a pride in their patience; but this never fails, if the bad husbands were of their own choosing, against their friends' consent, for then they will be sure to make good their own folly. †

*The answer of the reputed wise man has been put into verse by some disciple:

"I would advise a man to pause

Before he take a wife;

Indeed, I own I see no cause

He should not pause for life."

†The poet Thompson thus describes the transition from lover to husband:

"First a kneeling slave, and then a tyrant."

Horace Walpole writes to Sir Horace Mann that Lady Boyle's portrait bore the inscription, "Died of a cruel husband."

Unhappy marriages seem to result oftenest from hasty unions, where the shortest cut has been taken to the altar, or where romantic women, knowing the weaknesses or vices of their lovers, are silly enough to think that they can make good husbands out of bad men.

"The universal reception that marriage has had in the world is enough to fix it for a public good, and to draw everybody into the common cause; but there are some constitutions, like some instruments, so peculiarly singular that they make tolerable music by themselves, but never do well in concert."— Farquar's "The Inconstant."

"Courtship to marriage is a very witty prologue to a very dull play." — Congreve's “The Old Bachelor." Act v., Sc. 2.

"O cursed state!

How wide we err when apprehensive of the load

OF GREAT PLACE. *

Men in great place are thrice servants; servants of the sovereign or State, servants of fame, and servants of business; so as they have no freedom, neither in their persons, nor in their actions, nor in their times. It is a strange desire to seek power and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man's self. The rising unto place is laborious, and by pains men come to

Of life.

We hope to find

That help which nature meant in womankind!

To man that supplemental self designed."— Ibid.

The following attractive picture of married life will be found in Farquar's "Sir Harry Wildair":

"There was never such a pattern of unity. Her wants were still prevented by my supplies; my own heart whispered me her desires, because she herself was there. No contention ever arose but the dear strife of who should most oblige. No noise about authority; for neither would stoop to command, because both thought it glory to obey."

Byron characterizes matrimony as the finger-post of DoctorsCommons. "Not a divorce stirring," he writes to the poet Moore, "but a good many in embryo in the shape of marriages." And Peter Pindar compares it to Jeremiah's figs:

66 6

"Ah! matrimony! thou art like

To Jeremiah's figs;

The good were very good, the bad

Too sour to give the pigs."

"Alack-a-day!' replied the corporal, brightening up his face; 'your honour knows I have neither wife nor child. I can have no sorrows in this world.'". - Tristram Shandy.

*No man's experience comprised more of the vicissitudes of place-hunting than Bacon's. His career began with disappointment and ended in disgrace. "If this be to be a Lord Chancellor," he said, “I think if the Great Seal lay upon Hounslow Heath, nobody would take it up."