Now, most people are married by banns, and licences are rarely required; this simplifies matters very much. But before the wedding is definitely decided on I should advise the clergyman of the church one is always in the habit of attending being consulted about all the legal forms; he is sure to know all that is necessary, will tell you exactly what you ought to do, what the choir and organist will expect (of course, if the organist be a gentleman, as he often is, and a personal friend, you must give him a present, not money), and what steps you must take about the decorations. But do not hand these over to a shop; be sentimental for once, and let personal friends undertake this duty. I would rather have hideous decorations put up by hands that loved one, on such an occasion, than the most exquisite trophies ever designed by Mrs. Green and put up by those who do not even know the bride and bridegroom by sight.
I do hope every bride may soon have her _dot_, just like all French and German maidens have; but in any case she must not go penniless upon her wedding tour. Coventry Patmore’s idea in the ‘Angel of the House,’ that his three-days’ bride asked him to pay for the sand-shoes--‘Felix, will you pay?’--as a matter of course, is a mere man’s notion. I am certain she must have hated to do it, and would have given anything for some money of her own: so do not let Paterfamilias forget this, even if he have the conscience to allow his daughter to go penniless into her husband’s house; and let him give his daughter a nice little sum of money, in order that she may not have to ask her husband for a farthing until their return home, when the allowance question should be gone into and settled, thus doing away with the constant jar about money, which is at the bottom of more matrimonial unhappiness than is anything else.
I think I have said all that is to be said on the subject of weddings, and have stated boldly how best to secure the happiness of our children; it is a subject on which I feel very deeply, and when I see girls marry men who cannot by any possibility make good husbands or good fathers, I long to tell them this, but of course no one but their mothers can; and I shall hope that I may influence one or two to do so, and moreover to insist that their children do not marry to perpetuate the disease or the evil tendencies that must wreck innocent lives that have no business ever to exist; for while, if marriage is entered into properly, there can be no failure about it, marriage being the perfection of life, the uniting and joining of the two lives, which, separate, are indeed incomplete, but which, brought together, form an absolute and wonderful whole, a marriage which perpetuates the vices of a drunkard, of an evil temper, of an habitual liar, or the constitution of a consumptive or of a lunatic, is absolutely wicked, and can never be anything but a curse to the wife and mother, whatever it may be to the man himself. A _roué_ has discounted his chances of a happy married life. No woman can reform a _roué_, and even if she could she should not try, because in her children she will perpetuate the father’s vices, and will make the world worse a thousandfold by those she brings into it, while at the best she may save a soul, though I personally do not believe she could even do this; at all events, it is not right to sacrifice her future and her children’s future in the endeavour, and therefore I hope she may never try.