from either. This is the figurative ideal: what
is the reality? The mutual wearing of an
eternal chain; the mutual shackling by
unyielding fetters; the subjection of the one under
the mastership of the other; the delivering up
of free will and independence when we sign
those terrible indentures of the Irrevocable, by
which we are bound to the most tremendous
apprenticeship life has to offer. This is not
saying that duty and love are not higher
than liberty: it is simply clearing the ground
of false definitions, and maintaining the right of
spades to be called by their names. No, there
is no liberty in marriage. There may be happiness
—that I do not gainsay; and there is certain
to be cause and room for nobleness and self-sacrifice;
but that is not liberty — with which the
question stands at this moment.

The very household furniture is a fetter,
and a chain as well: the two being distinct
varieties of the implements of slavehood: the
one binding you fast, the other weighing you
down. Chairs and tables do both. They
weigh you down with champagne and dinners,
with wax-lights and suppers, with linen floorcloths
and balls; and they bind you back from
Egypt and Morocco, South America and the
Fiji Islands, Nova Zembla and Spitzbergen—to
all of which places your wandering feet would
have carried you long ago, had you had the
courage to constitute yourself a Bohemian
pur sang, and to sink the chairs and tables.
Not daring to do this, you sit in the one,
clamped hard and fast to the other, and spend
your time in regretting your wooden slavery.

Is not hospitality, too, a fetter?
Hospitality, according to the traditions of the
modern drawing-room caravanserai, is an awfully
long chain round some necks, and a tremendous
fetter to many feet, keeping them nailed
to the arid rocks of impecuniosity, where no
rich grass for cattle, no savoury fruits for man,
grow among the granite, but only lichens, and
dim tufts of heather, and withered pods of the
golden gorse: growths of stony poverty, bare
of wealth and beauty alike. How many of us
have gone down that long dark road of monetary
ruin, starting from the brilliantly-lighted mansion
of Hospitality, where all the chimneys reeked a
welcome, substantially interpreted and
aromatically flavoured; and where the rooms were
caves of mirth and music, not in any way
associated with Trophonius! And yet Trophonius
lives down there at the end of the lane; and the
luckless visitor to his cave has rather a different
lodging to what his own Hospitality —
eventuating in Ruin—gave his guests.

What a fetter, too, is sickness! Perhaps the
heaviest and with the sharpest strain, as it is
the saddest. Ah! those weary fetters jangling
down by the sick bed, and barring the sick
man's door! Those tear-dimmed fetters of
sickness! And yet we would rather wear
them ourselves than let another bear their
weight, while we walked abroad into that sterile
freedom where is no duty and no power of self-
sacrifice — that hideous superficiality of free
will, where is wanting the divinest liberty of all
—the liberty to soothe, to serve, and to save.
Better the heaviest chain and bullet that evil
fortune can forge and mould, than that wilderness
of life where duty, love, and sacrifice are
not! Humanity dressed in silver- spangled
robes, with a golden crown on its head and
pleasant smiles upon its lips — humanity all light
and no shadow — all song and no imploring cry
of need—is a fine thing to contemplate in a
heavenly envelope; but while down on this
sorrowful earth of ours, while breathing in a
sob with every breath, and looking on the sun
through the mist of tears, it is the fatalest
mistake man can make. The soul that shakes off
its fetters of help and sympathy shakes off the
best parts of its bondage to heaven.

Temper, too, throws chains and fetters round
life. The bad temper of a house is
emphatically the master and the tyrant of that
house: the criss-cross-row dominates the whole
series. Who that is tied up by the neck to a
bad temper, can boast of freedom? You might
as well talk of summer ardours in the midst of
a snow-storm! When madam has a headache,
or a fit of the spleen, because of some trumpery
disappointment, the whole house clanks in
chains tuned up to sol in alt; when master's
digestion is awry, because Greenwich fishes
are uncomfortable dream-fellows, the chains
clank G flat, an octave lower, with a running
accompaniment of double notes, tied in the
bass; even little miss, when petulant and saucy,
and sorely needing the divine application of
bread and water, has the power to clash the
links together, and make old wise papa himself,
and mamma, tender, grave, and good, dance a
mazurka obligata, striking their fetters instead
of their heels. Temper is, indeed, a diligent
chain-maker, forging fetters as fast as the shot-
tower rains down shot when the heated metal is
shaken through the holes. There is no freedom
for any one where there is bad temper; not for the
peccant chain-maker himself, bound by his own
links to dissatisfaction and despair; nor for those
who live within reach of his fingers so deft at
padlocking up all the liberties that come within
the circle of his passion or sullenness. Whom
do we study to please in the family? Amanda,
sweet and smiling, whose chains are only love
and gentleness, who is always ready to sacrifice
herself for the good of others, whose wildest
fit of passion is as little to be feared as the
assault of a white mouse? Or Drusilla, irritable
and bilious, with a soul like a volcano, and that
not covered with snow—or covered with snow
more black than white — nor masked by
vineyards, though it may be by vinegar jars; with a
temper and passions always at explosion point;
without a thought for others in all this grim
selfishness of hers, and with not a spark of pity in
her lurid fires of rage and hate? Certainly not
Amanda. She, poor love, gets loaded with all the
burdens:— oh! Amanda will go; Amanda will
do it; Amanda will sew on my buttons; Amanda
will entertain Mrs. Wigsby — we all hate Mrs.
Wigsby, cross old thing, and fly out of the