CONCLUSION
We have taken for the subjects of the foregoing moral essays,
twelve samples of married couples, carefully selected from a large
stock on hand, open to the inspection of all comers. These samples
are intended for the benefit of the rising generation of both
sexes, and, for their more easy and pleasant information, have been
separately ticketed and labelled in the manner they have seen.
We have purposely excluded from consideration the couple in which
the lady reigns paramount and supreme, holding such cases to be of
a very unnatural kind, and like hideous births and other monstrous
deformities, only to be discreetly and sparingly exhibited.
And here our self-imposed task would have ended, but that to those
young ladies and gentlemen who are yet revolving singly round the
church, awaiting the advent of that time when the mysterious laws
of attraction shall draw them towards it in couples, we are
desirous of addressing a few last words.
Before marriage and afterwards, let them learn to centre all their
hopes of real and lasting happiness in their own fireside; let them
cherish the faith that in home, and all the English virtues which
the love of home engenders, lies the only true source of domestic
felicity; let them believe that round the household gods,
contentment and tranquillity cluster in their gentlest and most
graceful forms; and that many weary hunters of happiness through
the noisy world, have learnt this truth too late, and found a
cheerful spirit and a quiet mind only at home at last.
How much may depend on the education of daughters and the conduct
of mothers; how much of the brightest part of our old national
character may be perpetuated by their wisdom or frittered away by
their folly--how much of it may have been lost already, and how
much more in danger of vanishing every day--are questions too
weighty for discussion here, but well deserving a little serious
consideration from all young couples nevertheless.
To that one young couple on whose bright destiny the thoughts of
nations are fixed, may the youth of England look, and not in vain,
for an example. From that one young couple, blessed and favoured
as they are, may they learn that even the glare and glitter of a
court, the splendour of a palace, and the pomp and glory of a
throne, yield in their power of conferring happiness, to domestic
worth and virtue. From that one young couple may they learn that
the crown of a great empire, costly and jewelled though it be,
gives place in the estimation of a Queen to the plain gold ring
that links her woman's nature to that of tens of thousands of her
humble subjects, and guards in her woman's heart one secret store
of tenderness, whose proudest boast shall be that it knows no
Royalty save Nature's own, and no pride of birth but being the
child of heaven!
So shall the highest young couple in the land for once hear the
truth, when men throw up their caps, and cry with loving shouts -
GOD BLESS THEM.
