The dramatic instinct to which the life of towns is necessarily unfavourable, is kept alive in the country by the smallness of the stage and the fewness of the actors.

A village is an organism, conscious of its several parts, as a town is not.
In a village everybody is a public man.

The great events of his life are of public as well as private significance, appropriately, therefore, invested with public ceremonial.

Thus used to living in the public eye, the actors carry off their parts at weddings and other dramatic ceremonials, with more spirit than is easy to a townsman, who is naturally made self-conscious by being suddenly called upon to fill for a day a public position for which he has had no training.

That no doubt is the real reason for the growth of quiet marriages; and the desire for them, I suspect, comes first from the man, for there are few women who at heart do not prefer the old histrionic display.
However, the village wedding at which I suddenly found myself a spectator was, for a village, a singularly quiet one.