of centuries under a bran new coat of arsenious
green: all of which is bad enough; but the
clumsy hands breeding an endless succession of
cockatrices might perchance be worse, and of
graver consequences in the end.

Marrying for love seldom needs much paint
beyond that belonging to the condition as by
right: but marrying for money, and making
believe that it is for love? convenience
transformed to passion?— interest putting on the
semblance of devotion?— why,, bushels of paint
and gallons of varnish are not enough to make
black white there, or to smooth over the
awkward inequalities that cannot be planed
away! The wicked little lady daubs herself all
over with the rosiest pigment at command: she
hides the pictures in her heart— the big yellow
purse, the opera-box, the diamond necklace, the
flaming carriage, and the stately household,
under the paint of an all-shadowing love— she
scrawls all sorts of Arcadian pastorals over the
hempen canvas which else would show too
coarsely; and if she is wise as well as wicked,
she will go on painting and scrawling to the end
of time. Usually she is too indolent and too
careless to renew the dilapidations; and, when
the first coating has rubbed off, never seeks to
lay on a fresh one. Unless, indeed, there is a
contingency in the background, and her
husband's will may still make or mar her fortunes.
When rich old men, or rich unpersonable young
men, marry pretty portionless wives, they had
better keep that contingency in their own hands,
if they care for pleasing landscapes on their
walls, or visions of Arcadian beauty in their
galleries. We have our special paint-pots for
love, whereby we cover up all the ugly spots
of temper and unkindness, of small passions
and mean ways that else belong to us, till
we seem wingless angels to our fellow-love.
This we all do alike; not of design, and with
no foregone intention to deceive, but by the
natural ordering of the condition. Ah, well!
wait till matrimony, that terrible disenchanter,
has worn off the varnish, and then see what
knots come up through the bare boards, what
ugly veinings, what flaws and cracks and
rents and rotten fibres are beneath, not one of
which was seen in the beginning, while the
varnish of love was fresh and bright. Is it
good for man that there should be this time
of dreaming and deceit?— is it good that
the ruggeduess of the future should be masked
beneath the varnished smoothness of the
present?— that love should usher in the soul's
waking with the morning songs of birds and
the hived sweetness of flowers, with rosy clouds
resting on the mountain-tops, and the
gracious veiling of the lake breaking up into
multiplied forms of misty beauty, when the truth
lying behind all this loveliness and delight
traces out but sadness and despair and the
terrible rising to the gaunt day-work of
disenchantment? It may be that some good
purpose, some strong and holy shaping, lies in
these fond dreams of the spirit: it may be that
truth, in the beginning, would be too hard and
angular for the soul to bear, and that if men
were not softly led by illusion, they would
faint by the way, and droop and die, and never
reach the goal at all. If Love could not
plume himself in angel's wings, who would
care to harbour him in their hearts? Should
we choose unrest, disquiet, sick jealousy, the
maddening strife of passions unallayed, and
duty and desire impossible to be united, unless
we believed we held the ultimate good of life
in our hands?— unless we thought to hear
seraph's footsteps round about us, and the
songs of cherubs over our heads? Love! Love!
oh, you do well to paint your wings rainbow-hued
and your bow of golden glimmer, and
your arrows flowery red! You do well to
promise everlasting joys now in the beginning!
What if we waited for truth and the ending,
Love? What if we peeped behind the mask,
and stripped the paint from the bow and the
wings, dear Love? What if we saw you as you
are, and as you will be, when you have flowed
down the turbid stream of use and many days,
and are then no longer young Love, but old and
well accustomed— no longer hope and the
unknown, but disappointment and the fathomed?
Ah! and what then? Why, then, dear Love,
all the wise in heaven and earth would shade
their eyes from yours, and hide their faces when
you passed by; they would snatch their hands
from out your grasp, and steel their lips against
your touch; they would work and they would
weep, they would fast and they would pray, but
they would put from them, as too bitter to be
borne, the disenchantments of your arts and
the waking from your sorceries! Ah, Love!
Love! Love! for one honest soul that you
have blessed with true joy and led up to
unswerving good, count your hecatombs of slain in
the plain and the flood, and your legions left
stranded in despair, desolate, undone, and
withered for ever!

Good humour, or what passes-by that name,
is very often only a matter of paint and
varnish. It ought to be more, I know; it ought
to be the clear grain, close and well knit, of
a pure and cleanly growth— true marble and
no stucco— mahogany or rosewood or knotted
oak or grand old ebony, no wretched
make-believe of pine and deal painted and varnished
to a lifeless simulacrum. And yet how often
it is nothing else! What fiery passions are
seething in that inner caldron, when the
outward seeming is the smoothest and fairest
to be imagined! What a blackened monument
of angry tempers and burning hatred, of
despair, and all uncharitableness, are daubed into
the likeness of a Carrara monolith, with the
base surrounded by a procession of all the
virtues, and on the capital an angel: and a first-rate
likeness! Often when the smile is sweetest
and the laugh is loudest, and the veiled eyes
are cast down with gentlest pressure, or lifted
up with broadest glory— often when the
pictured story on the surface is of the blithest,
sometimes of the most heroic— the heart
beneath is most cankered, and the original tracing