you them. do not guess their size until you measure Certes, I should like my village to be settled among great trees, and not far from a river. The life of water is a great charm to a landscape. My village youth will want to boat and bathe, of course; these are boyhood's necessities. As to the girls, I think the canoe suits them perfectly. Rowing is rather too strenuous an effort for them but a light canoe may be lazily : paddled, and a pretty girl seated in one, gliding along the stream, looks like some marvellous aquatic bird that has come down to astonish the swans. I am not certain, by the way, that a lake would not be preferable to a river, if there were only a lake to be got for the purpose. When I close my eyes I can see Windermere, with all its islands sleeping in the summer sun, though 'tis at least a decade since I stood beside that loveliest of lakes. But the thought of a Ꭰ lake has made me desultory and digressivea thing inexcusable in a scientific treatise like the present. As I write, I perceive in the Globe newspaper that somebody or other wants to establish a model village in Surrey—a kind of colony of genteel paupers. This, be it well understood, is not my scheme. I wholly object to it. Genteel pauperism should not be petted. What we want is to develop the highest energies of the people; and for this purpose I hold that a healthy village life is the best conceivable condition. In my supposititious village I want no one who cannot live generously in proportion to his rank in life. I want the cream of all classes, poet or carpenter, mathematician or mower. I want men who are masters of their art: and such men will be able to pay proper rent for suitable dwellings, and to eat strong meat and drink ale or wine, and to live lives suitable to their vocations. The Skimpoles and Micawbers may go to the pauper villages which an imbecile generosity, a maleficent benevolence, aspires to found. My idea is the germ of a mighty social revolution: for, if such villages as I propose should prosper and multiply, cities and towns would perish. CHAPTER IV. THE MARRIAGE OF COMPLETION. Haec est illa tibi promissa Theophila, Cani, Martial. NOTWITHSTANDING what Matthew Arnold aptly calls the sexual insurrection,' I am of opinion that the majority of Englishwomen of culture take a reasonably just view of their position and destiny. The ladies who raise a clamour for certain political and social privileges never hitherto allowed to women are so pertinacious and vociferous that we are sometimes misled into imagining them far more important and influential than they truly are. The great mass of gentlewomen look upon the movement with indifference or contempt, aware that woman's highest destiny is to marry-to be merged in her husband, and complete his character. It is my firm faith that for every man there is one woman, a fit consort; and for every woman, one man; and that all marriages between persons not designed for each other, though they may seem to work well enough, are necessarily imperfect. The world is a loser by unsatisfactory marriages: many a man turns politician, or invents a pill, or writes a sensation novel, simply because he cannot live happily with his wife. The ideal marriage occurs only when two persons meet who are the complements of each other; and if this be the case, I hold that they will know it by a sudden instinct on their very |