axiom which nobody dreams of disputing. If the husband, said Elia, be a man with whom you have lived on a friendly footing before marriage-if you did not come in on the wife's sideif you did not sneak into the house in her train, but were an old friend in fast habits of intimacy before their courtship was so much as thought on,-then, "look about you; your tenure is precarious; before a twelvemonth shall roll over your head, you shall find your old friend gradually grow cool and altered towards you, and at last seek opportunities of breaking with you." Elia professed to have scarce a married friend of his acquaintance, upon whose firm faith he could rely, whose friendship did not commence after the period of his marriage. With some limitations, les femmes can endure that; but that the goodman should have dared to enter into a solemn league of friendship in which they were not consulted, though it happened before they knew him, is to them, on Charles Lamb's showing, intolerable. John Locke on his travels had a shrewd eye open to the way of the world when he thus touched on a delicate question in one of his letters to Dr. Muppletoft: "I cannot forbear to touch, en passant, the chapter of matrimony, which methinks you are still hankering after; but if ever you should chance so to be given up as to marry, and, like other loving husbands, tell your wife who has dissuaded you, what a case shall I be in!" Dr. Parr, in a grandis et verbosa epistola to Sir Samuel Romilly, expresses his "exquisite satisfaction" in knowing that his friends see and feel the sincerity of his regard. "Before marriage, I, with my wonted plain dealing, told Mrs. Parr that I had given certain promises, . . . and I added explicitly, that no earthly consideration should induce me to violate one promise," etc. The doctor and Mrs. Parr led a cat-and-dog's life, -there be liars else. But no such feline and canine concatenation marked or marred the married life of Dr. Chalmers; and him we find firing up at the bare notion of his old friend James Meldrum being kept away by Mrs. Meldrum from a long stay at the Kilmany Manse, because the manse had now a mistress. "This I could not submit to, and told her and Grace, that if I had conceived matrimony to be that kind of thing, which was to detach my heart from any of its old feelings or old friendships, I never should have entered into it. James is accordingly with us; and the perfect cordiality with which all my friends are received and entertained by the lady of the house, has made her dearer to me than ever." When Mr. Bowker, in Land at Last, hesitates about renewing his intimacy with a dear old friend come to town again, because "you see there's the wife to be taken into account now," a less mistrustful spirit replies, interrogatively, if not reproachfully, "You surely wouldn't doubt your reception by her? The mere fact of your being an old friend of her husband's would be sufficient to make you welcome." But Mr. Bowker can only bless the innocence of this amiable reasoner, and assure him, on the other hand, that to have been the friend of a man before his marriage is, ipso facto, to be on unfriendly terms with his wife. This cynic would seem to have graduated in the school of Hood's regretful Benedick, and to have learnt his ways, and his wife's,—the good lady who was for making a clean sweep of old clothes, old hats, and old friends: "My clothes they were the queerest shape! Such coats and hats she never met! My ways they were the oddest ways! My friends were such a vulgar set! Poor Tomkinson was snubb'd and huff'd, What d'ye think of that, my Dog?" The best spirit of the better self of Polonius informs and animates these the closing lines of one of Ben Jonson's metrical epistles: "Look if he be Friend to himself that would be friend to thee: For that is first required, a man be his own : But he that's too much that, is friend of none. § IV. IN FOR A FIGHT, AND HOW TO GET OUT OF IT. "Beware Of entrance to a quarrel; but, being in, Bear it that the opposer may beware of thee." Hamlet, Act i., Sc. 3. So Laertes is counselled by his worldly-wise, experienced, shrewly-observant, cautiously circumspective, diplomatically disposed sire. Polonius is for being slow to fight, but for hitting hard when once in for it. Loath to begin, he would make the end a speedy, sharp, and sure one. He would by no means strike the first blow, but he would take good care to have the last, and to make it a caution. With good advice make war, he would say; and the good advice will apply both to the taking action for a fight-which should be wary; and to the taking part in it—which should be eager, energetic, and vigorously in earnest. Hard by the gates of hell is the dwelling, in Spenser, of Atè, mother of strife; it is a "darksome delve far underground, with thornes and barren brakes environ'd round, that none the same may easily out win; Yet many waies to enter may be found, Men capable of great and prolonged efforts of resistance, Mr. Froude remarks, are usually slow to commence struggles of which they, better than any one, foresee the probable consequences. Schiller's Archbishop of Rheims, in a medley of images, implores the high contending powers to "pause with dread, Ere from its scabbard ye unsheathe the sword. But not, obedient, as from fields of air * Under the title of "Polonius on Polemics," a previous chapter of illustrations of this Shakspearian text may be seen in the present penman's Recreations of a Recluse, vol. i., pp. 176—196. Returns the falcon to the sportsman's hand, Doth the wild deity obey the call Of mortal voice." And the appeal of the Maid of Orleans herself is to the same effect: 66 'Sovereigns and kings! disunion shun with dread! Wildly the sweeping conflagration spreads." The beginning of strife is said, in holy writ, to be as when one letteth out waters. Another text in the Book of Proverbs runs, "Go not forth hastily to strive, lest thou know not what to do in the end thereof." A hasty contention, saith Jesus the son of Sirach, "kindleth a fire, and a hasty fighting sheddeth blood. If thou blow the spark, it shall burn." There is a Spanish proverb which Dr. Trench quotes as giving a fearful glimpse of those blood feuds which, having once begun, seem as if they could never end, and of violence evermore provoking its like: "Kill, and thou shalt be killed, and they shall kill him who kills thee." Bishop Fleetwood's lament over public disorder in Marlborough's time, is praised by Earl Stanhope for its "admirable eloquence"-where he says that God for our sins permitted the spirit of discord to go forth, and by troubling sore the camp, the city, and the country, to "spoil for a time this beautiful and pleasing prospect, and give us in its stead-I know not what." The beginnings of strife are as definite and often paltry as its progress is indefinite and its end beyond all guesswork. As to the waging of war, the text in Ecclesiasticus will apply: "Let reason go before every enterprize, and counsel before every action." And so, in the sense already indicated, will this: "Do nothing without advice; and when thou hast once done, repent not." War once waged, on good advice, the same soundness of counsel would urge the waging it with a will, so as to ensure what Sir William Curtis pleonastically desiderated as "a speedy peace and soon." Being in for a With good advice quarrel, make short work of it, if you can. make war, and with stout heart carry it on. as ever you may; but, once in for it, so fight that your foe be the first to cry, Hold, enough! If it be a just and necessary war-and no other is excusable-quit you like men, be strong. To the nobles, and to the rulers, and to the rest of the people, the exhortation of Nehemiah was, in face of the enemy, "Be not ye afraid of them: remember the Lord, which is great and terrible, and fight for your brethren, your sons, and your daughters, your wives, and your houses." The "fight" has in it the ring of the iterated and reiterated monosyllable in "Britons, strike home!" The mighty men of Babylon who had forborne to fight, were no model for armed Hebrews. When a Christian apostle has to fight, it is not as one that beateth the air. Had it been the vocation of that spirited tent-maker to fight another sort of good fight of faith, as the Maccabees of old, his prowess would have won him a name, among those who waxed valiant in fight, and turned to flight the armies of the aliens. And in that cause, too, would it have been his great right to say, "I have fought a good fight" -not uncertainly, hesitatingly, half-heartedly, or 'ws äepa dépwv -a pugilistic metaphor, which may mean beating the air either in private exercise, or as a prelude to the fight, or during the fight itself, when aiming a blow, and, by missing, spending one's strength for nought,—making a show of an encounter, but failing to hit hard, hit fast, hit home. Lord Bacon, in his essay on Delays, speaks of the helmet of Pluto as secrecy in the council, and celerity in the execution;" and his archiepiscopal annotator exposes the unwisdom of those "mock-wise men" who, though slow and quick just in the same degree that a really wise man is, are so in the wrong places,-making their decisions hastily, and then becoming slow in the execution; "who unmask their battery hastily, and then think of loading their guns." Elsewhere Dr. Whately describes a sort of people who are "slow and sure"-sure in cases that admit of leisurely deliberation, but utterly failing where promptitude is called for; as again. in another place he makes a study of those who "are bold |