I would not my unhoused free condition
Put into circumspection and confine,
For the sea's worth.--Shakspeare.
When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live
till I were married.--Shakspeare.
Nothing is further from the single man's thoughts than
that he will continue in the single state all his life. He expects, when
the young woman meets his gaze who satisfies either his esthetic or
pecuniary ideas, generally the latter, or both, to take that young woman
to his bosom and begin married life. This is a natural state of mind,
and there is no harm in indulging it. It shall be the object of a few of
these pages to present such aspects of the unmarried state of man as
have principally commended themselves to general attention. The bachelor
has plenty of arguments to keep him single while he is not in love. He
thinks the arguments keep him single, good fellow. He says, as I heard
one of them say: "I would ask the unbiased observer what there is in the
world, after all, to induce a man to commit matrimony. Some one will
say: 'To have some one to care for him when sick.' This is complimentary
to woman--indicating that she marries to become a nurser of the sick and
old. And must a man endure all the pains and throes of years of
matrimonial cyclones that he may have some one to stew his gruel during
the brief space of his last illness? If a bachelor have money, he will
have friends to care for him, no fear, and if he be poor, a wife is the
last thing in the world he needs. She divides his pleasures and doubles
his sorrows.