I ask it very seriously, and merely in a symbolic way.  Romeo is a shadow, the adored Juliet is a shadow; but the two immortal shades represent for all time the mad lovers whose lives end in bitterness.  I say again that only reasonable and calm love brings happy marriages.  It is as true as any other law of nature that “he never loved who loved not at first sight;” but the frantic, dissolute man of genius who wrote that line did not care to go further and speak of matters which wise men of the world cannot disregard.  The first blinding shock of the supreme passion comes in the course of nature; but wise people live through the unspeakable tumult of the soul, and use their reason after they have resisted and subdued into calm strength the fierce impulse which has wrecked so many human creatures.  When writing on “Ill-Assorted Marriages,” I urged that men and women who are about to take the terribly momentous steps towards marriage must be guided by reason, and I repeat my adjuration here.  When Lord Beaconsfield said, “I observe those of my friends who married for love—­some of them beat their wives, and the remainder are divorced,” he knew that he was uttering a piece of mockery which would have been blasphemous had it been set down in all seriousness.  He meant to say that headlong marriages—­marriages contracted in purblind passion—­always end in misery.  No marriage can bring a spark of happiness unless cool reason guides the choice of the contracting parties.  A hot-headed stripling marries a handsome termagant—­her brilliant face, her grace, and rude health attract him, and he does not quietly notice the ebullitions of her temper.  She is divine to him; and, though she snarls at her younger brother, insults her mother, and to outsiders plainly exhibits all sorts of petty selfishness, yet the stripling rushes on to his fate; and at the end of a few miserable years he is either a broken and hen-pecked creature or a mean and ferocious squabbler.

How different is the case of those who are not precipitate!  Take the case of the splendid cynic whose words we have quoted.  With his usual sagacity, Lord Beaconsfield waited, watched, and finally succeeded in making an ideally happy marriage in circumstances which would have affrighted an ordinary person.  All the world knows the story now.  The brilliant young statesman dared not risk the imputation of fortune-hunting; but the lady knew his worth; she knew that she could aid him, and she frankly threw over all the traditions of her sex and of society and offered herself to him.  No one in England who is interested in this matter can fail to know every detail of a bargain which makes one proud of one’s species, for Lord Ronald Gower has told us about the married life of the brilliant Hebrew who mastered England.  The two kindred souls were bound up in each other.  The lady was not learned or clever, and indeed her husband said, “She was the best of creatures; but she never could tell which came first—­the Greeks