Page:Comedies of Publius Terentius Afer (1870).djvu/12

vi trary, with a power of divorce, it appears ever to be as joyful a conquest as our own hardly-won assents of free maidens.

Marriage customs and manners differ at times and places even with us; nor need we refer to Fleet marriages or Gretna Green, now both amidst the past; but our maidens of the sister Isle in this century found charms in an elopement beyond any other form of ceremony. The Calmuck damsel prefers to be mounted on horseback, and give her lover a glorious chase and capture of herself, if she so choose. The present Belgravian mode is an untimely breakfast, probably the worst mode of all. Let these, then, excuse the Roman youth for seizing their brides, following their time-honoured god Quirinus, and also the contemporary practice of the Spartans, who preferred to win their brides in darkness and by raid, although palpably connived at by the bride, than by the wearisome tedium of the hymeneal.

Neither must we confound the class of Hetairæ of the ancients with the proscribed class of the present time; for they were educated women, whilst the wife was uneducated; they were brilliant in society, whilst the wife was immured at home. We find a Thais accompanying Alexander and chief instrument in burning Persepolis; Rhodope is mentioned mythically as the builder of the third pyramid of Gheeza; Phryne who