Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 11, 1895 - Miscellanies, Volume III

^VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE'
so natural and inviting, that the step has an air of
great simpHcity and ease ; it offers to bury for ever
many aching pre-occupations ; it is to afford us un-
faihng and familiar company through life ; it opens
up a smiling prospect of the blest and passive kind
of love, rather than the blessing and active ; it is
approached not only through the delights of court-
ship, but by a public performance and repeated legal
signatures. A man naturally thinks it will go hard
with him if he cannot be good and fortunate and
happy within such august circumvallations.
And yet there is probably no other act in a man's
life so hot-headed and foolhardy as this one of mar-
riage. For years, let us suppose, you have been
making the most indifferent business of your career.
Your experience has not, we may dare to say, been
more encouraging than Paul's or Horace's ; like
them, you have seen and desired the good that you
were not able to accomplish ; like them, you have
done the evil that you loathed. You have waked at
night in a hot or a cold sweat, according to your
habit of body, remembering, with dismal surprise,
your own unpardonable acts and sayings. You have
been sometimes tempted to withdraw entirely from
this game of life ; as a man who makes nothing but
misses withdraws from that less dangerous one of
billiards. You have fallen back upon the thought
that you yourself most sharply smarted for your
misdemeanours, or, in the old, plaintive phrase, that
you were nobody's enemy but your own. And then
you have been made aware of what was beautiful
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