128.  Still, of all the faults as to temper, your melancholy ladies have the worst, unless you have the same mental disease.  Most wives are, at times, misery-makers; but these carry it on as a regular trade.  They are always unhappy about something, either past, present, or to come.  Both arms full of children is a pretty efficient remedy in most cases; but, if the ingredients be wanting, a little want, a little real trouble, a little genuine affliction must, if you would effect a cure, be resorted to.  But, this is very painful to a man of any feeling; and, therefore, the best way is to avoid a connexion, which is to give you a life of wailing and sighs.

129.  BEAUTY.  Though I have reserved this to the last of the things to be desired in a wife, I by no means think it the last in point of importance.  The less favoured part of the sex say, that ’beauty is but skin-deep;’ and this is very true; but, it is very agreeable, though, for all that.  Pictures are only paint-deep, or pencil-deep; but we admire them, nevertheless.  “Handsome is that handsome does,” used to say to me an old man, who had marked me out for his not over handsome daughter.  ‘Please your eye and plague your heart’ is an adage that want of beauty invented, I dare say, more than a thousand years ago.  These adages would say, if they had but the courage, that beauty is inconsistent with chastity, with sobriety of conduct, and with all the female virtues.  The argument is, that beauty exposes the possessor to greater temptation than women not beautiful are exposed to; and that, therefore, their fall is more probable.  Let us see a little how this matter stands.

130.  It is certainly true, that pretty girls will have more, and more ardent, admirers than ugly ones; but, as to the temptation when in their unmarried state, there are few so very ugly as to be exposed to no temptation at all; and, which is the most likely to resist; she who has a choice of lovers, or she who if she let the occasion slip may never have it again?  Which of the two is most likely to set a high value upon her reputation, she whom all beholders admire, or she who is admired, at best, by mere chance?  And as to women in the married state, this argument assumes, that, when they fall, it is from their own vicious disposition; when the fact is, that, if you search the annals of conjugal infidelity, you will find, that, nine times out of ten, the fault is in the husband.  It is his neglect, his flagrant disregard, his frosty indifference, his foul example; it is to these that, nine times out of ten, he owes the infidelity of his wife; and, if I were to say ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the facts, if verified, would, I am certain, bear me out.  And whence this neglect, this disregard, this frosty indifference; whence this foul example?  Because it is easy, in so many cases, to find some