hunters. Young ladies and their mammas are popularly supposed to have some appreciation of this business of amusement. For the present occasion we limit our remarks to the case of heiress-hunting.

And one heartily is sorry for the poor heiress. Her chances of happiness are certainly much more remote than those of less wealthy young ladies. In the first place, the poor girl is often the only child. There are occasionally families so wealthy that every girl has a fortune, and a good one, although the girls are numerous. But, as a rule, she is the only girl, and often the only child. As an only child she must have been an object of terrible anxiety to her parents. Every little ill and ailment will have been magnified by their fears. Family cares are divided when they are spread over a lot of children, but they are intensified when they are concentrated on a single child. Then the unfortunate girl is often brought up under a notion that is most debasing to a girl's mind, that she is to be prized, not for herself, her nature and culture, but for the property she is to possess. There are heiresses and heiresses. Many girls who have a great deal of money in reversion are quite poor until their parents depart, the said parents resembling that great character in history who declined to take off his clothes until it was bed-time. The heiress, in her consciousness of wealth, does not give full weight to the fact that her wealth is in prospect, not in possession. She is tormented with the idea that it is not herself but her gold that is being sought. Even years after she has been married, when her children are growing up and she and her husband are on most jog-trot familiar terms, this illusion will constantly crop up and perhaps paint imaginary scenes of pure unalloyed affection. Her parents will be still more anxious on her behalf. Too often they most resolutely and distinctly make up their minds that there must be a very full equivalent in cash or coin for any substance their daughter may possess. They too often forget that this substantial

equivalent may leave the heiress poor indeed in all that will make her truly happy, and satisfy the deepest wants of a woman's nature.

As a rule I take rather an unfavourable view of heiresses. Above all, the heiress who knows she is an heiress and presumes upon it is simply detestable. They are apt to have been spoilt in childhood. This gives a warp to their disposition, which is frequently disagreeably apparent in voice and disposition. Surely heiresses have been a good deal petted and coddled in the items of diet and exercise. They have frequently failed to have a full share of air and light, of bodily and intellectual exercise, and this has acted injuriously on their mental and physical development. In fact, I generally find-although one must always look at such general findings cum grano-that one has to abate or miss some excellence for every additional ten thousand pounds of fortune. If she has thirty thousand pounds she wears spectacles; if she has forty she squints in addition; if she has fifty thousand she is idiotic beside; if she has sixty she is illiterate, and so on. There is throughout the world a system of balances and compensations which often operates unpleasantly on the heiresses. I remember a man desperately hard up telling me that, after all, he thought he had the choice of three heiresses. One was an atheist, the next a fool, and the third no better than she should be. And even when the heiress is as nice as can be she is solitary or ill, and would willingly part with her banker's book for her bloom. These natural drawbacks, whatever their extent may be, diminish the heiress's chance of a good match. A man who is shy and proud and independent and rather poor, with all his moral and intellectual excellence, will often shrink from the society of wealthy women, and not subject himself to the chance of the imputation of mercenary motives. He is the man who least of all can bear or confront the insolence of prosperity. And while it is the tendency of good men to keep at a distance, it is naturally the tendency

of other men, notably those of the hawk and kite species, carefully and dexterously to watch the habitat of their heiress, and after all necessary preparation swoop on their devoted quarry.

For the heiress-hunter is an undoubted fact, frequently an unconscionable, repellent, selfish fact. There are men who fling themselves deliberately into this life-and-death game as utterly devoid of ruth and pity as may be. They go to work in a calm, calculated, and businesslike point of view. It is a terrible thought that perhaps after all this is the very best way possible of making love. A man whose feelings are deeply and perhaps inextricably engaged will not play the great game of love-making with half the skill or success of the heiress-hunter. The fellow wants money, and wants it horribly. It may be said for him that he has never been trained for work, and cannot get it if he wanted it, and cannot set about it if he tried. If he has some ridiculouslysmall fixed income, he loafs about, and by an ingenious system of goldbeating spreads it over as large a surface as he can. If he has a little capital he probably prefers to inake a dash, and rejects the Fabian policy for that of Marcellus. The first thing that an heiress-hunter does is to select his hunting-ground. Man, 'the mighty hunter, always looks out for an appropriate huntingground. Man, when nomadic, not settled, hunting, not pastoral, lives on prey, which he seeks within limits as wide as possible. The Indian, whether by instinct or intuition, or summarising instantaneously the results of his experience, detects perhaps simply by the configuration of the country or the direction of the rivers the whole fauna and flora of a wide-spreading district. They know where the moose and the red deer and the rich-furred quadrupeds are to be sought. The expert heiresshunter looks out for a shoal of heiresses, just as the fisherman looks out for a shoal of herrings. He intuitively rejects Bognor and Dawlish, Cromer and Bridge of Allan, as places which are to a very high degree unlikely. Bath and Chel

tenham may offer their chances, Brighton and Torquay are not to be neglected; but perhaps he may arrive at the enlightened decision that the Yorkshire watering-places perhaps offer the best chances, such as Harrogate and Scarborough. The heiress-hunter proceeds methodically. He has his book, in which he enrols his calculation of the chances. He will not, like the celebrated bumpkin, request a speedy answer, inasmuch as he has another young lady in his eye, or resemble a young lady with whom we are acquainted who told Jones that she would accept him very shortly, provided Robinson did not make her an offer in the meantime. Nevertheless the principle on which he proceeds will be identical. He will have his list of heiresses. He will guard, so far as may be, against going on mere hearsay and probability, and will seek to obtain legal accuracy in all details of wealth, although in such cases a great deal will necessarily be left to probabilities. If he is a man of some tenderness and ruth he will take a smaller heiress with a prettier face and more graceful manners instead of a plainer, stupider, but more moneyed partner. But, as a rule, all such questions of sentiment are as entirely discarded as they would be in any legal or commercial transaction. The affair is a money affair, and must be governed by entirely prudential considerations. Every little accessory of the plot will be most carefully studied. It is a game in which you cannot afford to throw a point away. All matters of dress, which the lovelorn swain will often discard, but which are nevertheless, in the judgment of the best critics, of the highest importance, will receive careful attention. You may also rely upon it that no personal awkwardness or lack of conversational small talk will injuriously affect the heiresshunter. Good and clever girls will easily forgive the negligence or stupidity which they can best explain by their own overwhelming influence. But I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that a large proportion of heiresses are neither good

nor clever. Then the hunter has often a very difficult game to play. He has sometimes a couple of heiresses in tow, whom he meets every day and almost every hour; and he has adroitly to contrive that the circumstance shall help him in his game rather than prove a hindrance. Some men are hardly equal to complicated operations, and therefore they confine themselves rigidly to the single object of their one chosen quarry. If they fail here they shift the venue, as the lawyers say, and move off rapidly into more favourable quarters. If they are in a great hurry they conduct their movements with startling rapidity; and sometimes they lend a zest to their work by betting very freely upon its results.

The great point with the heiresshunter is to arrange matters as speedily as possible, and to commit the heiress as deeply as he can; he therefore presses on the business with a well-regulated ardour. If it is allowed to assume an unimpulsive and deliberate stage, the poor heiress-hunter is apt to come to much grief. At some critical moment, brothers interfere, or her family solicitor is desired to look into matters. The mention of settlements frequently proves ominous. The gentleman has no corresponding settlements to make. The lady's friends not unnaturally look upon him in the light of an impostor. Sometimes the affair is broken off altogether, not without some use of opprobrious language by an elder brother; sometimes the settlement is made strictly upon the lady and the children of the marriage. Often the lady takes a mercenary fit, and breaks it off herself; sometimes she takes a fit of enthusiastic self-abnegation, and insists on surrendering at discretion both herself and her property. Cases are even known where a gentleman has been contented to waive his claim for a pecuniary consideration from the friends. The case occasionally arises where each side has been deceived; where the heiress-hunter imagines that he has caught his heiress, and the penniless lady thinks that she has found a rich

husband. Mr. Dickens has worked out this instance in Alfred Lammle and his wife. Captain Marryat, in one of his stories, makes the parties separate as soon as they discover their error, and the lady commits the now fashionable crime of bigamy. One of the instances in which poetical justice is freely dealt out, is when the heiress-hunter falls deeply in love, and is then rejected for his mercenary conduct. The game of the feelings is a dangerous one, and our hero incurs this peril, though he minimises it, and when he falls a victim, it is ever as in the great scenes of plays, where the villain by mistake has exchanged the poisoned rapier, or drank of the poisoned cup.

It strikes me that I have been a little hard on the heiresses, and even, though assuredly not undeservedly, on the heiress-hunter. Beyond all comparison, some of the best and brightest women I have known have been heiresses-but with an important qualification. They are heiresses who have never been married. They have been clever enough to avoid all the arts and crafts of the heiress-hunter. Perhaps they have been a great deal too clever. They have been so anxious to escape a simulated affection that they have lost a true. They have imputed, or have been persuaded to impute motives, where none existed. In early life they have allowed themselves to be governed too much by 'a little hoard of maxims preaching down a daughter's heart.' They have never allowed themselves to fall in love with the tutor, after the magnificent precedents of the Shirley of Charlotte Bronté, and the Lady Geraldine of Mrs. Browning. Perhaps they have so awed good men by their riches that they have never had the chance of mating with an equal mind, and any other chance they have righteously despised. I think myself that the old maids are at least as good as the matrons, and the heiresses are the pleasantest variety of old maids. You see they are old maids by their own free will. They have not married for the mere sake of getting settled,

as is the case with so many women. Their sweetness is not of that acidulated kind which is the generic flavour of spinsters. Frequently they have a singularly wide and generous range of sympathies. To give and to forgive seems the very air they draw. They have more culture than most women have, the result of larger means and greater leisure, and very frequently they are fond of friends and of society, largely indulging elevated tastes. They

will give you sympathy, appreciation, allowance, when perhaps none others will; and every clergyman knows where the stream of bounty will run amplest and least stained by selfish motives. Now and then you hear that such a one has married. People lift up their eyes and their hands. It almost seems as if nature were avenging a life of common-sense by an act of tremendous absurdity. But I don't see why they should not. An immortal spirit never grows old. I know a brilliant old lady of seventy who is younger in heart and mind than most girls of seventeen. When Louis XIV. asked a very old woman at what age women ceased to love, he was told that he must ask some one older than herself. Of one thing you may be quite sure-that this sort of heiress never marries a heiress-hunter.

But there is a very important distinction that requires to be drawn. There is a confusion of thought about heiress-hunting which requires to be cleared up. Your heiress-hunters are not generally drawn from the class of poor men. Of course there are the younger son, and the soldier of fortune, and the parson, and the adventurer, all of whom, in the opinion of parents and guardians, may be as hungry pike and jack lying in wait for the innocent young gudgeon. But it is quite possible that even these objects of terror may be true men, and even true lovers, and that the real fortune-hunter may come under such a guise of respectability that he is not even suspected. As a rule, young men will be young men, and not think overmuch of that matter of money in a wife. If

the case were otherwise, there would be a tremendous rush towards girls with money; and this tremendous rush does not, as a matter of fact, exist. The heiress receives perhaps more offers, but perhaps she attracts less love. After all, the love of love is a much commoner and a much stronger feeling than the love of money. Many a young man who, with the mock worldly wisdom of the young, has laid down a mercenary system for himself, brilliantly falsifies it by marrying his sister's governess or his aunt's companion. He goes into the future in the spirit of adventure. He can draw to any extent on that large, illimitable bank of hope. He has no actual experience of the great practical difficulty of keeping up house and home. It is this inexperience and unwisdom that go so far in justifying French parents in arranging marriages for their children, and vindicates the remark that, if marriages were left to the Lord Chancellor or some other authority, there would be more happy marriages than there are now. As an ordinary rule, the blind youth obeys the blind natural law of falling in love, and then goes in steadily for the Darwinian struggle for existence. If he does not do this, but, on the contrary, sacrifices the emotions of youth for miserly thoughts, he has, depend upon it, the strong element of the Jonas Chuzzlewit or the Barnes Newcome in him. The young man who looks out resolutely for money has probably got plenty of his own. He has probably sown all his wild oats, and so is better able to take a 'commercial' view of the 'transaction.' He is perfectly able to marry a young girl on her merits; and even now, with his debased feelings and selfish experience, it would be happy for him if he could do so. But money is the great merit sought. He is not oblivious of other merits, can take a rational estimate of good looks, good education, and good connections; but most of all he has the greatest notion of adding house to house, land to land, money to money. And if this is really the governing motive, no amount of fortune of his own will exempt him from the imputa

tion of being a fortune-hunter. And the heiress, captured and hunted, will have to undergo whatever inconvenience or unhappiness that may belong to such processes. The most grievous fault in heiress-hunting is that it simulates affection, and only gives the deceived heiress the shadow and affectation of it. And it is 'sad to think what that poor ill-fated woman has to undergo. It is just possible that her case may turn out better than we think for. The heiress-hunter may begin with money but may end with love, on the priniciple of the fool who came to mock and remained to pray. And as the home-nest is built up, and children come, and many mutual interests arise, love may be strong as a rock at last. But this is not the ordinary way in which men's characters work towards their destinies. There can be nothing more torturing than for a young wife to discover that her husband has only married her for her money, and probably does not scruple to tell her so, in moments of ill temper. She finds out, perhaps, that he is sordid, ignorant, hard, selfish, unloving. If she is a good woman, her fate is little less than martyrdom. All the flowers of life wither at her touch, like those of poor Sybel in Marguerite's garden. Then sets in the mighty famine of the heart. Then the very beauty of the outward world becomes almost heart-breaking. You may tell her to rally; but the dove with a broken pinion cannot soar. I am supposing that she is a good woman; but if she has little strength of principle, hers may be a fate heavier than any earthly sufferings.

If a man makes up his mind deliberately. that he will marry for money, and clings to this aim with downright tenacity of purpose, I see no reason why he should not succeed in his object. I think we may justifiably indulge in a great deal of moral indignation against the heiress-hunter. But when we come to classify and define, we see that there are large allowances to be made, and that in many cases the reproach has virtually to be wiped away. There are men in the

world who say, honestly enough, that they will only marry when they love, and yet that they can only love where there is money. Such men often find that their stars forbid the desired conjunction of love and money; that they must sacrifice the one or the other, or perhaps make a feeble compromise by accepting a little of each. It is impossible not to feel sympathy with such men. The poor curate, who can never be anything else than a poor curate; the half-pay officer, the younger son with a narrow, fixed limited income; the lay fellow of a college, who has never succeeded in opening up any career in life for himself these men, if they are to be married at all, must marry those who are large or small heiresses in their way. And if there is genuine love in the case, I do not see that the heiress has done badly for herself who has married a poor gentleman. The great doctrine which Mr. Trollope persistently preaches-a sort of gospel, in its way, which he untiringly reiterates in all his stories-is, that you must marry for money, and you must not marry for anything else. To this school it cannot but be that Mr. Trollope's writings have done good by their inculcation of a wholesome moral. Take the case of fellows of colleges. Under the old regulations, they lost their income as soon as they married; under the new regu lations, they may marry and retain their fellowships for twelve years, and then they lose them. Under either regulation, a marriage in many cases must be a marriage for money. Then again, there are men who candidly say that they must have money; perhaps they will even tell women so, or at least imply it, and the women will not be offended, at least under such circumstances as those which I have just mentioned. A case arises of heiress-hunting in a very modified form, which is perhaps not so uncommon. A man finds

that he can no longer hope to marry for love, and so he thinks that he will marry for money. He would have married for love once, and would have desired nothing better. But the love was lost to him. Per