The banter in question has been of all sorts--sometimes vague, sometimes particular, in its import. A few censors have confined themselves to simple condemnation. 'A fellow that's married's a _felo-de-se_,' wrote the late Shirley Brooks; and he had been anticipated in the stricture. An anonymous satirist had written:
'"Wedlock's the end of life," one cried; "Too true, alas!" said Jack, and sigh'd-- "'Twill be the end of mine."'
And if matrimony was not suicide, it was ruin. Old Sir Thomas More had said of a student who had married that 'in knitting of himself so fast, himself he had undone.' And a later rhymer, contrasting wedding with hanging, had come to the conclusion that
'Hanging is better of the twain-- Sooner done and shorter pain.'
To the suggestion that a youth should not marry till he has more wisdom, the Italian epigrammatist replies that if he waits till he has sense he will not wed at all. Marriage, said the famous Marshal Saxe, in effect, is a state of penance; Rome declares there are seven sacraments, but there are really only six, because penance and matrimony are one.
Hymen, says Chamfort, comes after love, like smoke after flame. It is the high sea, observes Heine, for which no compass has yet been invented. Its melancholy uncertainty is illustrated by the remark of Samuel Rogers, that it does not matter whom you marry--she will be quite another woman the next day. It was Rogers, too, who, when he heard of a certain person's nuptials, declared that if his friends were pleased his enemies were delighted. Selden's complaint against marriage was that it is 'a desperate thing,' out of which it is impossible to extract one's self; but then he lived before the era of Sir Cresswell Cresswell. And the utmost that the conventional detractor will admit is, that the institution gives to man two happy hours. 'Cursed be the hour I first became your wife,' cries the lady in the well-known quotation; to which her spouse replies that--'That's too bad; you've cursed the only happy hour we've had.' But Palladas, the Greek, as translated by Mr. J. H. Merivale, goes a little farther than this, declaring that
'All wives are bad; yet two blest hours they give: When first they wed, and when they cease to live.'
