fits of a jealousy which tyrannizes over vir

tue.

All these misfortunes, and a number of others, which every day aggravate, are not the necessary consequences of marriage, but only of the folly of some persons, and should not be laid generally. There are fewer unhappy marriages than there are said to be; and those even which are looked upon as such have their sweets.

I am certain, if divorces were permitted among us, we should see a much smaller number of husbands separated than the spiteful pleasantry of ill-natured wits suppose. Divorce was permitted at Rome, and we only meet with one in the course of five hundred years.

Again ;-if we meet with women of an unaccommodating disposition, there are found a much greater number of peevish and unjust husbands. Whoever searches into causes of domestic strife, will find there are few to which the husband has not given rise, for want of prudence or moderation.

The greater part suffer themselves to be led by them, at first, like children; and are afterwards uselessly desirous of assuming a government which they have lost by their own fault; others unite violence and freaks with an intermitting tenderness, which an enraged woman does not always take in good part. There are those who even refuse their husbands what is indispensably necessary. Many set the example of a most abandoned life. Have such husbands any right to complain, if their wives do not possess the nature of angels, and fail in complaisance to a brute, to whom they are united?

A man of a good-tempered disposition knows how, without violence, to bring back his wife to the right path, if she has wandered from it; he knows how to excuse her some slight faults, which he looks upon as a small tribute, that saves her from greater, imperfections. This is the true philosophy to which all married men should accustom themselves. Socrates, who married Xan

tippe, a woman of rather a difficult temper to please, was not the more averse to the marriage knot; and he spoke of it, one day before a numerous assembly, in such honourable terms, and placed all its advantages in so favourable a point of view, that all his hearers got married within the year. Finally, although the enemies of marriage say, if it is the means of happiness here below, it ought to be by the bonds of a wellselected marriage, which bind two persons attached to each other, as much by their inclinations as by the obligation they have entered into. Such husbands regulate themselves more by the taste they have for each other than by fashion. The husband, far from blushing to appear with his wife, never finds himself happier than in her company, who communicates to him pleasure and good-humour. The wife, in her turn, finds, in the conversation of a complaisant husband, instruction, which his tenderness renders dear to her. It is from him she loves to receive truths, which

he knows how to adapt to her understanding, and season with some obliging turn:~ she only learns well of such a master. "Without the kisses of Adam, Eve would have understood nothing."

Every thing brings to the recollection of an affectionate wife the object whom she loves: his name, his rank, recalls to her, without ceasing, him to whom she has given her heart.

Each of these married persons finds in the other a lover, a friend, an adviser, and a witness of each other's worth: pleasures are doubled by being shared; and, with a tender consoler, small troubles, which are inseparable from human life, are borne lightly.

CHAP. X.

EDUCATION OF CHILDREN.

HOWEVER tender the sentiments of a father may be towards his children, there is found in the breasts of mothers yearnings: of a more lively affection.

The heart of a woman, when not given to the wanderings of the passions, devotes all her affections to a family, whose delight she is; and there are not in Nature ties that can be compared to those which unite a tender mother to her children, who pay her with a return of gratitude.

This sweet empire, cemented by kindness and gratitude, forms the whole glory and felicity of a wise woman.

"Behold, there are my diamonds, and my jewels," said the illustrious mother of

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