Marriage Quote by Charles Farrar Browne

Affection lands here with a thud of comic spelling, and that’s the point. Charles Farrar Browne, writing as the satirical “Artemus Ward,” builds a love note out of deliberate rough edges: “wimin,” “Continent,” “altho’.” The misspellings are not just a rustic costume; they’re a device that lets sentiment and insult share the same sentence without either one fully winning. He praises his wife as “one of the best” in a grand, mock-heroic register, then punctures it with the culinary absurdity of a lamb “with mint sauce.” Domestic bliss, in other words, is being served as a joke you can chew.

The line’s sly target is Victorian piety about marriage and femininity. The “gentle as a lamb” ideal belonged to a culture that prized female softness and moral tidiness; Browne’s speaker can’t keep that ideal intact for more than a beat. By specifying “isn’t always,” he implies that her occasional sharpness is normal, even necessary. The gag turns on an unspoken truth: intimacy produces friction, and a spouse who never bites back is less partner than prop.

Context matters: Browne was a mid-19th-century American humorist working in a booming marketplace for comic lecturing and newspaper wit, where “country” voices were deployed to deflate elite manners. The faux-naif tone gives him plausible deniability while smuggling in a modern thought: admiration doesn’t require idealization. The wife is “best” precisely because she’s not decorative livestock.