Note 46 — A WEDDING IN OLDEN DAYS.

How miserably has modern refinement reversed those scenes of happiness and hilarity—when the gentry of my native land were married in warm, cheerful chambers, and in the midst of animated beings, beloving and beloved! No gloom was there: every thing seemed to smile; and all thoughts of death or memoranda of mortality were discarded.

Now, those joyous scenes are shifted by sanctity and civilisation. Now, the female soul almost shudders—and it well may—on reaching the site of the connubial ceremony. The long, chilling aisle, ornamented only by sculptured tablets and tales of death and futurity, is terminated by the sombre chancel—whence the unpupilled eye and vacant stare of cold marble busts glare down on those of youth and animation, seeming to say, “Vain, hapless couple! see me—behold your fate!—the time is running now, and will not stop its course a single moment till you are my companions!” Under such auspices, the lovers’ vows are frozen ere they can be registered by the recording angel.

The cheerless ceremony concluded, the bridegroom solemnly hands the silent bride into her travelling chariot; hurries her to some country inn, with her pretty maid—perhaps destined to be a future rival; they remain there a few days, till yawning becomes too frequent, and the lady then returns to town a listless matron—to receive, on her couch of ennui, a string of formal congratulations, and predictions of connubial comfort, few of which are doomed to be so prophetic as the bridal stocking of her grandmother.