some women understand that a husband's
heart—let him be ever so devoted and
affectionate—has vacant places in it which they
can never hope to fill. It is a house in which
they and their children, naturally and
properly, occupy all the largest apartments and
supply all the prettiest furniture; but there
are spare rooms which they cannot enter,
which are reserved all through the lease of
life for inevitable guests of some sort from
the world outside. It is better to let in the
old friend than some of the substituted
visitors, who are sure, sooner or later, to
enter where there are rooms ready for them,
by means of pass-keys obtained without the
permission of the permanent tenants. Am I
wrong in making such assertions as these?
I should be willing enough to think it
probable—being only a bachelor—if my views
were based on mere theory. But my opinions,
such as they are, have been formed with the
help of proofs and facts. I have met with
bright examples of wives who have strengthened
their husbands' friendships as they
never could have been strengthened except
under the influence of a woman's care,
employed in the truest, the tenderest, the most
delicate way. I have seen men rescued from
the bad habits of half a lifetime by the luck
of keeping faithful friends who were the
husbands of sensible wives. It is a very trite
and true remark that the deadliest enmities
between men have been occasioned by women.
It is not less certain though it is a far less
widely-accepted truth that some (I wish I
could say many) of the strongest friendships
have been knit most closely by women's
helping hands.

The real fact seems to be, that the general
idea of the scope and purpose of the
Institution of Marriage is a miserably narrow one.
The same senseless prejudice which leads
some people, when driven to extremes, to
the practical confession (though it may not
be made in plain words) that they would
rather see murder committed under their own
eyes than approve of any project for obtaining
a law of divorce which shall be equal in its
operation on husbands and wives of all
ranks, who can not live together, is answerable
also for the mischievous error in
principle of narrowing the practice of the
social virtues, in married people, to
themselves and their children. A man loves his
wife—which is, in other words, loving
himself—and loves his offspring, which is
equivalent to saying that he has the natural
instincts of humanity; and, when he has
gone thus far, he has asserted himself as a
model of all the virtues of life, in the estimation
of some people. In my estimation, he
has only begun with the best virtues, and has
others yet to practise before he can approach
to the standard of a socially complete man.
Can there be a lower idea of Marriage than
the idea which makes it, in fact, an institution
for the development of selfishness on a
large and respectable scale? If I am not
justified in using the word selfishness, tell me
what character a good husband presents
(viewed plainly as a man) when he goes out
into the world, leaving all his sympathies in
his wife's boudoir, and all his affections
up-stairs in the nursery, and giving to his
friends such shreds and patches of formal
recognition, in place of true love and regard,
as consist in asking them to an occasional
dinner-party, and granting them the privilege
of presenting his children with silver
mugs? He is a model of a husband, the
ladies will say. I dare not contradict them;
but I should like to know whether he is also
a model of a friend?

No, no. Bachelor as I am, I have a higher
idea of Marriage than this. The social
advantages which it is fitted to produce
ought to extend beyond one man and one
woman, to the circle of society amid which
they move. The light of its beauty must
not be shut up within the four walls
which enclose the parents and the family,
but must flow out into the world, and
shine upon the childless and the solitary,
because it has warmth enough and to spare,
and because it may make them, even in their
way, happy too. I began these few lines by
asking sympathy and attention for the interest
which a man's true friends have, when,
he marries, in his choosing a wife who will
let them be friends still, who will even help
them to mingling in closer brotherhood, if
help they need. I lay down the pen, suggesting
to some ladies—affectionately suggesting,
if they will let me use the word, after
some of the bold things I have said—that it
is in their power to deprive the bachelor of
the sole claim he has left to social
recognition and pre-eminence, by making married
men what many of them are, and what more
might be—the best and truest friends that
are to be found in the world.

ALUMINIUM.

THE age of composite-metals, which has
given us so many false Dromios pretending to
brotherhood with silver, seems likely to pass
away. ln a short time we shall be in possession
of a new metal, which need not be
ashamed to announce itself by a distinct name.
A pewter-pot, is simply an honest pewter-pot;
he does not give himself out for a silver-tankard,
a royal claret-jug, a festive flagon, a
would-be chalice, or anything of that kind.
There he stands on the clean deal-table, with
his venerably-white bushy wig of foam; and
you know that his heart overflows with
generous stout, with bitter or dulcet ale, or with,
harmonious half-and-half. Pewter is not a
humbug metal. All substitute-silvers are
humbugs and changelings.

But it seems at last as if grandmother
Earth, being a little aided by human wit, had
been gradually preparing for the banishment