GAIETIES AND GRAVITIES. CONJUGALISM, Or the Art of making a good Marriage. SUCH is the attractive title of one of those Parisian publications, which from their union of a refined and piquant style with great licentiousness of matterfrom their abundance of caustic satire, or playful bantering, with the most barefaced want of principle -and from the employment of a cultivated, subtle, and even delicate intellect to inculcate the grossest sensuality, may be pronounced eminently and emphatically French. From the profligate romance of Louvet, down to that most heartless and detestable of all productions, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the literature of France, however poor in other respects, leaves not a single niche unoccupied in what may be termed her national Temple of polished Libertinism : while England, so superior to her rival in all the nobler departments of mental power, has fortunately seldom deigned to compete with her on this unhallowed and forbidden ground. One remarkable coincidence between the prurient writers of both countries is, the common hypocrisy and cant with which they set themselves up for moralists and saints whenever they are about to be particularly scandalous. We could mention certain British Mawworms who never venture upon an indecent or abusive article without a preface of pretended horror at the irreligion, indecorum, and personality, of some unacceptable contemporary. Thus the Viscount de S, which is the nom de guerre assumed by the author of "Conjugalism,” while, in the spirit of the misogynist Swift, he wallows in the most revolting nastiness of detail, is careful to add, that there is no security for female virtue or conjugal happiness unless it be grounded upon our holy religion; and at the very moment that he suggests means of the basest artifice, fraud, and forgery, to lovers of both sexes, for the attainment of their object, he piously warns them that there is no medium so likely to succeed as the practice of strict honour and unsullied morality. Upon other occasions, however, he forgets all his theoretical integrity, inculcates falsehood, treachery, and cheating, without deeming them worthy of even a passing apology, or, if he condescends to excuse them at all, revives the controversy of Thwackum and Square ; assures us that, if the end be the happiness of the parties, it completely sanctifies the means; quotes the old adage, that in Love and War all stratagems are allowable; and finally tells the reader, very cavalierly, that if any objections be made to the sordid duplicity which he advises, he rests his whole defence upon the title of his book, which he has called the art of making a good marriage. Without farther stigmatizing the pernicious tendency of this unprincipled work, we shall proceed to give such extracts from its unobjectionable passages as may afford amusing specimens of the author's style and power of observation, as well as of the Parisian fashions, habits, and modes of thinking upon that universally interesting subject-Marriage. The very first paragraph of the preliminary reflections is strikingly characteristic of the nation. Whoever is in the slightest degree conversant with French literature, must have observed the slavish conceit with which every individual, for many ages, identified his own personal vanity with that of the grand monarque, to which we may attribute their custom of ransacking ancient and modern history for bon-mots and fine sayings, that they might father them upon their own kings and princes. Every history of Henry the Fourth begins with the established anecdote, that, when in the plenitude of his power he was counselled to avenge himself upon some of his former opponents, he exclaimed-"It does not become the King of France to punish the injuries done to the Duke de Vendôme." The good folks of France repeat this trait of magnanimity without dreaming that the words were originally uttered by a Roman Emperor under somewhat similar circumstances. Nobody, without being suspected of Carbonari principles, could object to this loyal plagiarism, so long as it was exercised for the benefit of crowned heads; but it behoves us to get ready our spring-guns and steel-traps when our neighbours begin to poach upon our private manors, in the style of the following opening paragraph-" Mademoiselle Sophie Arnould, of cynical memory, amid a crowd of smart sayings and free sallies which have obtained for her the honour of a scandalous celebrity, compared Marriage to a bag full of venomous serpents, among which there were one or two good eels; "You put your hand into this bag,' said she, 'with your eyes bound, and you must be born under a singularly lucky star to avoid some of the cruel serpents, and pick out the good eel."" Unfortunately for Miss Sophie Arnould, we are told by so old a writer as Camden, that this was a favourite saying of Sir John More, the father of the celebrated Sir Thomas, who notwithstanding ventured to put his hand three times into the bag, and, so far from having his life shortened by his three wives, lived to the age of ninety, and then died in a very Anacreontic manner, of a surfeit occasioned by eating grapes. After having decided in his first chapter that Marriage, besides its political, religious, social, sentimental, and patriotic considerations, has also its gymnastic division, and that mannikins, pigmies, as well as all rickety and deformed cripples, ought to be prohibited by law from sullying by their abortions the noble and superb theatre of propagation, our author reminds his readers that the wedding-day is like the |