Page:Hesiod, and Theognis.djvu/151

'A fair but luckless girl, my lot has been
To wed perforce the meanest of the mean.
Oft have I longed to burst the reins, and flee
From hateful yoke to freedom, love, and thee."

Perhaps, on the whole, he had no great reason to speak well of the sex, for in one place, as if he looked upon marriage, like friendship, as a lottery, he moralises to the effect—

"That men's and women's hearts you cannot try
Beforehand, like the cattle which you buy;
$\scriptstyle {\left.{\begin{matrix}\ \\\\\ \ \end{matrix}}\right\}\,}$Nor human wit and wisdom, when you treat
For such a purchase, can escape deceit:
Fancy betrays us, and assists the cheat."—(F.)

But, if his witness is true, mercenary parents were as common of old as in our own day. He was led, both by his exclusiveness as an aristocrat, and his impatience of a mere money-standard of worth, to a disgust of—

"The daily marriages we make,
Where price is everything: for money's sake
Men marry; women are in marriage given.
The churl or ruffian that in wealth has thriven
May match his offspring with the proudest race;
Thus everything is mixt, noble and base!"—(F.)

And that he did ponder the regeneration of society, and strive to fathom the depths of the education question agitated in the old world, we know from a passage in his elegies, which, though we have no clue to the time he wrote it, deserves to be given in this place, both as connected with his notions about birth, and as