THE PHILOSOPHY AND POETRY OF MARRIAGE. EVERYBODY knows Plato's theory about marriage. He assumed that men and women were hemispheres, so to speak, of an original sphere; that ill-assorted marriages were the result of the wrong hemispheres getting together; that if the true halves met, the man became complete, and the consequence was the "happy-ever-after" of childhood's stories. We agree with the first of philosophers to a considerable extent. We hold that for every man there is one woman somewhere in the world, and for every woman one man. They seldom meet in time. If they did, what would become of the sensation-novelists? Mr. Tennyson has in The Princess dealt wisely and beautifully with the relations between men and women. But those relations can only be treated in an exoteric way under the conditions of modern literature. Neither University is at all likely to establish a Professorship of the Gay Science; but how excellent a thing it would be if young people could be taught the true principles of love and marriage! Look at the blunders daily made in a matter which is the turning-point of the whole life. that at intervals there comes u of woman's independence, of w chivalry are gone; the days Neither is the one nor the othe To be worshipped and be-rhyn tically as goddesses was their is their apparent destiny to e equal terms with men, and t from doctors to telegraph cler being closed to them as yet. that both extremes are sheer no designed to be neither man's best and most intimate friend. idea let us hope we shall co matter is in a yeasty ferment will move forward, and the foll nineteenth century will probal dawn of the twentieth. Marriage is the chief event SPENSER'S "PROTHALAMION." Call the maiden Bidding her cling round Ye also, virgins! For whom a bridal. Day cometh swiftly, Chant ye in measure Hymen ! Hymen !" 65 The only rival of the immortal Veronese is Edmund Spenser, from whose divine Prothalamion (divine, yet by the Epithalamion surpassed) we may venture to select one strophe: "Then forth they all out of their baskets drew Great store of flowers, the honour of the field, That like old Peneus' waters they did seem When down along by pleasant Tempe's shore Two of those nymphs meanwhile two garlands bound, Their snowy foreheads therewithal they crowned; Prepared against that day, Against their bridal day, which was not long, 1 On the subject of marriage the author was, during the last few years of his life, particularly eloquent. His essay on The Marriage of Completion in The Secret of Long Life, has been much admired by people who do not regard marriage with contempt.-F. C. VOL. II. E WHAT IS BETTING? WHY IS IT WRONG? BETTING is one of the greatest causes of national harm. It is a moral and mental malady which injures all classes, though not all classes alike. One of its most evil effects is that it prevents the younger members of the aristocracy from fulfilling the noble duties which they inherit. From an admirable article in The Saturday Review some years ago, which treated of the Poet-Capitalist, such as Lady Burdett-Coutts and Mr. Peabody, I cut the following passage:-"Something of the old patrician pride might have spurred the five or six great houses who own half London to construct the Thames Embankment at their own cost, and to hand it over free from the higglings of Mr. Gore to the people at large. Even now, we may hear of some Earl whose rent-roll is growing with fabulous rapidity, as coming forward to relieve Mr. Lowe by the offer of a National Gallery of Art, or checkmating the jobbers of South Kensington by the erection of a National Museum. It seems to be easy enough for Peer after Peer to fling away a hundred thousand at Newmarket or Tattersall's, and yet a hundred thousand would establish in the |