[Illustration: _To face Page 63._
_Stothard R.A. del._ _Neagle Sc._
MARRIAGE.
_Published March 1st. 1797, by Cadell and Davies Strand_]
The luxury and dissipation that prevails in genteel life, as it
corrupts the heart in many respects, so it renders it incapable of
warm, sincere, and steady friendship. A happy choice of friends
will be of the utmost consequence to you, as they may assist you by
their advice and good offices. But the immediate gratification which
friendship affords to a warm, open, and ingenuous heart, is of itself
sufficient motive to court it.
In the choice of your friends, have your principal regard to goodness
of heart and fidelity. If they also possess taste and genius, that
will still make them more agreeable and useful companions. You
have particular reason to place confidence in those who have shown
affection for you in your early days, when you were incapable of
making them any return. This is an obligation for which you cannot be
too grateful.--When you read this, you will naturally think of your
mother’s friend, to whom you owe so much.
If you have the good fortune to meet with any who deserve the name
of friends, unbosom yourself to them with the most unsuspicious
confidence. It is one of the world’s maxims, never to trust any person
with a secret, the discovery of which could give you any pain: but
it is the maxim of a little mind, and a cold heart, unless where it
is the effect of frequent disappointments and bad usage. An open
temper, if restrained but by tolerable prudence, will make you, on the
whole, much happier than a reserved suspicious one, although you may
sometimes suffer by it. Coldness and distrust are but the too certain
consequences of age and experience; but they are unpleasant feelings,
and need not be anticipated before their time.
But however open you may be in talking of your own affairs, never
disclose the secrets of one friend to another. These are sacred
deposits, which do not belong to you, nor have you any right to make
use of them.
There is another case, in which I suspect it is proper to be secret,
not so much from motives of prudence, as delicacy; I mean in love
matters. Though a woman has no reason to be ashamed of an attachment to
a man of merit, yet Nature, whose authority is superior to philosophy,
has annexed a sense of shame to it. It is even long before a woman of
delicacy dares avow to her own heart that she loves; and when all the
subterfuges of ingenuity to conceal it from herself fail, she feels
a violence done both to her pride and to her modesty. This, I should
imagine, must always be the case where she is not sure of a return to
her attachment.
In such a situation, to lay the heart open to any person whatever,
does not appear to me consistent with the perfection of female
delicacy. But perhaps I am in the wrong.--At the same time I must tell
you, that, in point of prudence, it concerns you to attend well to the
consequences of such a discovery. These secrets, however important
in your own estimation, may appear very trifling to your friend, who
possibly will not enter into your feelings, but may rather consider
them as a subject of pleasantry. For this reason, love-secrets are of
all others the worst kept. But the consequences to you may be very
serious, as no man of spirit and delicacy ever valued a heart much
hackneyed in the ways of love.
If, therefore, you must have a friend to pour out your heart to,
be sure of her honour and secrecy. Let her not be a married woman,
especially if she lives happily with her husband. There are certain
unguarded moments, in which such a woman, though the best and worthiest
of her sex, may let hints escape, which at other times, or to any
other person than her husband, she would be incapable of; nor will a
husband in this case feel himself under the same obligation of secrecy
and honour, as if you had put your confidence originally in himself,
especially on a subject which the world is apt to treat so lightly.
If all other circumstances are equal, there are obvious advantages
in your making friends of one another. The ties of blood, and your
being so much united in one common interest, form an additional bond
of union to your friendship. If your brothers should have the good
fortune to have hearts susceptible of friendship, to possess truth,
honour, sense, and delicacy of sentiment, they are the fittest and most
unexceptionable confidants. By placing confidence in them, you will
receive every advantage which you could hope for from the friendship of
men, without any of the inconveniences that attend such connexions with
our sex.
Beware of making confidants of your servants. Dignity not properly
understood very readily degenerates into pride, which enters into
no friendships, because it cannot bear an equal, and is so fond of
flattery as to grasp at it even from servants and dependants. The most
ultimate confidants, therefore, of proud people, are valets-de-chambre
and waiting-women. Show the utmost humanity to your servants; make
their situation as comfortable to them as possible: but if you make
them your confidants, you spoil them, and debase yourselves.
Never allow any person, under the pretended sanction of friendship, to
be so familiar as to lose a proper respect for you. Never allow them
to teaze you on any subject that is disagreeable, or where you have
once taken your resolution. Many will tell you, that this reserve is
inconsistent with the freedom which friendship allows. But a certain
respect is as necessary in friendship as in love. Without it, you may
be liked as a child, but you will never be beloved as an equal.
The temper and dispositions of the heart in your sex make you enter
more readily and warmly into friendships than men. Your natural
propensity to it is so strong, that you often run into intimacies
which you soon have sufficient cause to repent of; and this makes your
friendships so very fluctuating.
Another great obstacle to the sincerity as well as steadiness of your
friendships, is the great clashing of your interests in the pursuits
of love, ambition, or vanity. For these reasons, it would appear at
first view more eligible for you to contract your friendships with the
men. Among other obvious advantages of an easy intercourse between the
two sexes, it occasions an emulation and exertion in each to excel
and be agreeable: hence their respective excellencies are mutually
communicated and blended. As their interests in no degree interfere,
there can be no foundation for jealousy, or suspicion of rivalship. The
friendship of a man for a woman is always blended with a tenderness,
which he never feels for one of his own sex, even where love is in no
degree concerned. Besides, we are conscious of a natural title you have
to our protection and good offices, and therefore we feel an additional
obligation of honour to serve you, and to observe an inviolable
secrecy, whenever you confide in us.
But apply these observations with great caution. Thousands of women
of the best hearts and finest parts have been ruined by men who
approach them under the specious name of friendship. But supposing a
man to have the most undoubted honour, yet his friendship to a woman is
so near a-kin to love, that if she be very agreeable in her person, she
will probably very soon find a lover, where she only wished to meet a
friend.--Let me here, however, warn you against that weakness so common
among vain women, the imagination that every man who takes particular
notice of you is a lover. Nothing can expose you more to ridicule, than
the taking up a man on the suspicion of being your lover, who perhaps
never once thought of you in that view, and giving yourselves those
airs so common among silly women on such occasions.
There is a kind of unmeaning gallantry much practised by some men,
which, if you have any discernment, you will find really very harmless.
Men of this sort will attend you to public places, and be useful to
you by a number of little observances, which those of a superior class
do not so well understand, or have not leisure to regard, or perhaps
are too proud to submit to. Look on the compliments of such men as
words of course, which they repeat to every agreeable woman of their
acquaintance. There is a familiarity they are apt to assume, which a
proper dignity in your behaviour will be easily able to check.
There is a different species of men whom you may like as agreeable
companions, men of worth, taste, and genius, whose conversation, in
some respects, may be superior to what you generally meet with among
your own sex. It will be foolish in you to deprive yourselves of an
useful and agreeable acquaintance, merely because idle people say he is
your lover. Such a man may like your company, without having any design
on your person.
People whose sentiments, and particularly whose tastes, correspond,
naturally like to associate together, although neither of them have
the most distant view of any further connexion. But as this similarity
of minds often gives rise to a more tender attachment than friendship,
it will be prudent to keep a watchful eye over yourselves, lest your
hearts become too far engaged before you are aware of it. At the same
time, I do not think that your sex, at least in this part of the world,
have much of that sensibility which disposes to such attachments.
What is commonly called love among you is rather gratitude, and a
partiality to the man who prefers you to the rest of your sex; and
such a man you often marry, with little of either personal esteem or
affection. Indeed, without an unusual share of natural sensibility, and
very peculiar good fortune, a woman in this country has very little
probability of marrying for love.
It is a maxim laid down among you, and a very prudent one it is,
That love is not to begin on your part, but is entirely to be the
consequence of our attachment to you. Now, supposing a woman to have
sense and taste, she will not find many men to whom she can possibly
be supposed to bear any considerable share of esteem. Among these few
it is very great chance if any of them distinguishes her particularly.
Love, at least with us, is exceedingly capricious, and will not always
fix where reason says it should. But supposing one of them should
become particularly attached to her, it is still extremely improbable
that he should be the man in the world her heart most approved of.
As, therefore, Nature has not given you that unlimited range
in your choice which we enjoy, she has wisely and benevolently
assigned to you a greater flexibility of taste on this subject. Some
agreeable qualities recommend a gentleman to your common good liking
and friendship. In the course of his acquaintance, he contracts an
attachment to you. When you perceive it, it excites your gratitude;
this gratitude rises into a preference, and this preference perhaps
at last advances to some degree of attachment, especially if it meets
with crosses and difficulties; for these, and a state of suspense, are
very great incitements to attachment, and are the food of love in both
sexes. If attachment was not excited in your sex in this manner, there
is not one of a million of you that could ever marry with any degree of
love.
A man of taste and delicacy marries a woman because he loves her more
than any other. A woman of equal taste and delicacy marries him because
she esteems him, and because he gives her that preference. But if a
man unfortunately becomes attached to a woman whose heart is secretly
pre-engaged, his attachment, instead of obtaining a suitable return,
is particularly offensive; and if he persists to teaze her, he makes
himself equally the object of her scorn and aversion.
The effects of love among men are diversified by their different
tempers. An artful man may counterfeit every one of them so as easily
to impose on a young girl of an open, generous, and feeling heart, if
she is not extremely on her guard. The finest parts in such a girl may
not always prove sufficient for her security. The dark and crooked
paths of cunning are unsearchable and inconceivable to an honourable
and elevated mind.
The following, I apprehend, are the most genuine effects of
an honourable passion among the men, and the most difficult to
counterfeit. A man of delicacy often betrays his passion by his too
great anxiety to conceal it, especially if he has little hopes of
success. True love, in all its stages, seeks concealment, and never
expects success. It renders a man not only respectful, but timid to the
highest degree in his behaviour to the woman he loves. To conceal the
awe he stands in of her, he may sometimes affect pleasantry, but it
sits awkwardly on him, and he quickly relapses into seriousness, if not
into dulness. He magnifies all her real perfections in his imagination,
and is either blind to her failings, or converts them into beauties.
Like a person conscious of guilt, he is jealous that every eye observes
him; and to avoid this, he shuns all the little observances of common
gallantry.
His heart and his character will be improved in every respect by his
attachment. His manners will become more gentle, and his conversation
more agreeable; but diffidence and embarrassment will always make
him appear to disadvantage in the company of his mistress. If the
fascination continue long, it will totally depress his spirit, and
extinguish every active, vigorous, and manly principle of his mind.
You will find this subject beautifully and pathetically painted in
Thomson’s Spring.
When you observe in a gentleman’s behaviour these marks which I
have described above, reflect seriously what you are to do. If his
attachment is agreeable to you, I leave you to do as nature, good
sense, and delicacy shall direct you. If you love him, let me advise
you never to discover to him the full extent of your love; no, not
although you marry him. That sufficiently shows your preference, which
is all he is intitled to know. If he has delicacy, he will ask for no
stronger proof of your affection, for your sake; if he has sense, he
will not ask it for his own. This is an unpleasant truth, but it is my
duty to let you know it. Violent love cannot subsist, at least cannot
be expressed, for any time together, on both sides; otherwise the
certain consequence, however concealed, is satiety and disgust. Nature
in this case has laid the reserve on you.
If you see evident proofs of a gentleman’s attachment, and are
determined to shut your heart against him, as you ever hope to be used
with generosity by the person who shall engage your own heart, treat
him honourably and humanely. Do not let him linger in a miserable
suspense, but be anxious to let him know your sentiments with regard to
him.
However people’s hearts may deceive them, there is scarcely a person
that can love for any time without at least some distant hope of
success. If you really wish to undeceive a lover, you may do it in a
variety of ways. There is a certain species of easy familiarity in your
behaviour, which may satisfy him, if he has any discernment left, that
he has nothing to hope for. But perhaps your particular temper may not
admit of this.--You may easily show that you want to avoid his company;
but if he is a man whose friendship you wish to preserve, you may not
choose this method, because then you lose him in every capacity.--You
may get a common friend to explain matters to him, or fall on many
other devices, if you are seriously anxious to put him out of suspense.
But if you are resolved against every such method, at least do not
shun opportunities of letting him explain himself. If you do this, you
act barbarously and unjustly. If he brings you to an explanation, give
him a polite, but resolute and decisive answer. In whatever way you
convey your sentiments to him, if he is a man of spirit and delicacy,
he will give you no further trouble, nor apply to your friends for
their intercession. This last is a method of courtship which every man
of spirit will disdain. He will never whine nor sue for your pity.
That would mortify him almost as much as your scorn. In short, you may
possibly break such a heart, but you can never bend it. Great pride
always accompanies delicacy, however concealed under the appearance of
the utmost gentleness and modesty, and is the passion of all others the
most difficult to conquer.
There is a case where a woman may coquette justifiably to the utmost
verge which her conscience will allow. It is where a gentleman
purposely declines to make his addresses, till such time as he thinks
himself perfectly sure of her consent. This at bottom is intended
to force a woman to give up the undoubted privilege of her sex, the
privilege of refusing; it is intended to force her to explain herself,
in effect, before the gentleman deigns to do it, and by this means
to oblige her to violate the modesty and delicacy of her sex, and to
invert the clearest order of nature. All this sacrifice is proposed to
be made merely to gratify a most despicable vanity in a man who would
degrade the very woman whom he wishes to make his wife.
It is of great importance to distinguish, whether a gentleman who has
the appearance of being your lover, delays to speak explicitly, from
the motive I have mentioned, or from a diffidence inseparable from
true attachment. In the one case you can scarcely use him too ill; in
the other, you ought to use him with great kindness: and the greatest
kindness you can show him if you are determined not to listen to his
addresses, is to let him know it as soon as possible.
I know the many excuses with which women endeavour to justify
themselves to the world, and to their own consciences, when they act
otherwise. Sometimes they plead ignorance, or at least uncertainty,
of the gentleman’s real sentiments. That may sometimes be the case.
Sometimes they plead the decorum of their sex, which enjoins an equal
behaviour to all men, and forbids them to consider any man as a lover
till he has directly told them so.--Perhaps few women carry their ideas
of female delicacy and decorum so far as I do. But I must say you are
not intitled to plead the obligation of these virtues, in opposition
to the superior ones of gratitude, justice, and humanity. The man is
intitled to all these, who prefers you to the rest of your sex, and
perhaps whose greatest weakness is this very preference.--The truth of
the matter is, vanity, and the love of admiration, is so prevailing
a passion among you, that you may be considered to make a very great
sacrifice whenever you give up a lover, till every art of coquetry
fails to keep him, or till he forces you to an explanation. You can
be fond of the love, when you are indifferent to, or even when you
despise, the lover.
But the deepest and most artful coquetry is employed by women of
superior taste and sense, to engage and fix the heart of a man whom
the world and whom they themselves esteem, although they are firmly
determined never to marry him. But his conversation amuses them, and
his attachment is the highest gratification to their vanity; nay, they
can sometimes be gratified with the utter ruin of his fortune, fame,
and happiness.--God forbid I should ever think so of all your sex! I
know many of them have principles, have generosity and dignity of soul
that elevate them above the worthless vanity I have been speaking of.
Such a woman, I am persuaded, may always convert a lover, if she
cannot give him her affections, into a warm and steady friend, provided
he is a man of sense, resolution, and candour. If she explains herself
to him with a generous openness and freedom, he must feel the stroke as
a man: but he will likewise bear it as a man: what he suffers, he will
suffer in silence. Every sentiment of esteem will remain; but love,
though it requires very little food, and is easily surfeited with too
much, yet it requires some. He will view her in the light of a married
woman; and though passion subsides, yet a man of a candid and generous
heart always retains a tenderness for a woman he has once loved, and
who has used him well, beyond what he feels for any other of her sex.
If he has not confided his own secret to any body, he has an undoubted
title to ask you not to divulge it. If a woman chooses to trust any of
her companions with her own unfortunate attachments, she may, as it is
her own affair alone; but if she has any generosity or gratitude, she
will not betray a secret which does not belong to her.
Male coquetry is much more inexcusable than female, as well as more
pernicious; but it is rare in this country. Very few men will give
themselves the trouble to gain or retain any woman’s affections, unless
they have views on them either of an honourable or dishonourable kind.
Men employed in the pursuits of business, ambition, or pleasure, will
not give themselves the trouble to engage a woman’s affections, merely
from the vanity of conquest, and of triumphing over the heart of an
innocent and defenceless girl. Besides, people never value much what
is entirely in their power. A man of parts, sentiment, and address,
if he lays aside all regard to truth and humanity, may engage the
hearts of fifty women at the same time, and may likewise conduct his
coquetry with so much art, as to put it out of the power of any of
them to specify a single expression that could be said to be directly
expressive of love.
This ambiguity of behaviour, this art of keeping one in suspense, is
the great secret of coquetry in both sexes. It is the more cruel in us,
because we can carry it what length we please, and continue it as long
as we please, without your being so much as at liberty to complain or
expostulate; whereas we can break our chain, and force you to explain,
whenever we become impatient of our situation.
I have insisted the more particularly on this subject of courtship,
because it may most readily happen to you at that early period of life,
when you can have little experience or knowledge of the world; when
your passions are warm, and your judgments not arrived at such full
maturity as to be able to correct them.--I wish you to possess such
high principles of honour and generosity as will render you incapable
of deceiving, and at the same time to possess that acute discernment
which may secure you against being deceived.
A woman, in this country, may easily prevent the first impressions of
love; and every motive of prudence and delicacy should make her guard
her heart against them, till such time as she has received the most
convincing proofs of the attachment of a man of such merit as will
justify a reciprocal regard. Your hearts indeed may be shut inflexibly
and permanently against all the merit a man can possess. That may be
your misfortune, but cannot be your fault. In such a situation, you
would be equally unjust to yourself and your lover, if you gave him
your hand when your heart revolted against him. But miserable will be
your fate, if you allow an attachment to steal on you before you are
sure of a return; or, what is infinitely worse, where there are wanting
those qualities which alone can insure happiness in a married state.
I know nothing that renders a woman more despicable, than her
thinking it essential to happiness to be married. Besides the gross
indelicacy of the sentiment, it is a false one, as thousands of women
have experienced. But if it was true, the belief that it is so, and
the consequent impatience to be married, is the most effectual way to
prevent it.
You must not think from this, that I do not wish you to marry. On
the contrary, I am of opinion, that you may attain a superior degree
of happiness in a married state, to what you can possibly find in any
other. I know the forlorn and unprotected situation of an old maid, the
chagrin and peevishness which are apt to infect their tempers, and the
great difficulty of making a transition, with dignity and cheerfulness,
from the period of youth, beauty, admiration, and respect, into the
calm, silent, unnoticed retreat of declining years.
I see some unmarried women, of active, vigorous minds, and great
vivacity of spirits, degrading themselves, sometimes by entering
into a dissipated course of life, unsuitable to their years, and
exposing themselves to the ridicule of girls, who might have been
their grandchildren; sometimes by oppressing their acquaintances by
impertinent intrusions into their private affairs; and sometimes by
being the propagators of scandal and defamation. All this is owing to
an exuberant activity of spirit, which, if it had found employment
at home, would have rendered them respectable and useful members of
society.
I see other women, in the same situation, gentle, modest, blessed with
sense, taste, delicacy, and every milder feminine virtue of the heart,
but of weak spirits, bashful, and timid: I see such women sinking
into obscurity and insignificance, and gradually losing every elegant
accomplishment; for this evident reason, that they are not united to
a partner who has sense, and worth, and taste, to know their value;
one who is able to draw forth their concealed qualities, and show
them to advantage; who can give that support to their feeble spirits
which they stand so much in need of; and who, by his affection and
tenderness, might make such a woman happy in exerting every talent, and
accomplishing herself in every elegant art that could contribute to his
amusement.
In short, I am of opinion, that a married state, if entered into
from proper motives of esteem and affection, will be the happiest for
yourselves, make you most respectable in the eyes of the world, and
the most useful members of society. But I confess I am not enough of
a patriot to wish you to marry for the good of the public. I wish you
to marry for no other reason but to make yourselves happier. When I am
so particular in my advices about your conduct, I own my heart beats
with the fond hope of making you worthy the attachment of men who will
deserve you, and be sensible of your merit. But Heaven forbid you
should ever relinquish the ease and independence of a single life, to
become the slaves of a fool or tyrant’s caprice.
As these have always been my sentiments, I shall do you but justice,
when I leave you in such independent circumstances as may lay you
under no temptation to do from necessity what you would never do from
choice.--This will likewise save you from that cruel mortification to a
woman of spirit, the suspicion that a gentleman thinks he does you an
honour or a favour when he asks you for his wife.
If I live till you arrive at that age when you shall be capable to
judge for yourselves, and do not strangely alter my sentiments, I shall
act towards you in a very different manner from what most parents
do. My opinion has always been, that, when that period arrives, the
parental authority ceases.
I hope I shall always treat you with that affection and easy
confidence which may dispose you to look on me as your friend. In that
capacity alone I shall think myself intitled to give you my opinion; in
the doing of which, I should think myself highly criminal, if I did not
to the utmost of my power endeavour to divest myself of all personal
vanity, and all prejudices in favour of my particular taste. If you did
not choose to follow my advice, I should not on that account cease to
love you as my children. Though my right to your obedience was expired,
yet I should think nothing could release me from the ties of nature and
humanity.
You may perhaps imagine, that the reserved behaviour which I
recommend to you, and your appearing seldom at public places, must
cut off all opportunities of your being acquainted with gentlemen. I
am very far from intending this. I advise you to no reserve, but what
will render you more respected and beloved by our sex. I do not think
public places suited to make people acquainted together. They can only
be distinguished there by their looks and external behaviour. But it
is in private companies alone where you can expect easy and agreeable
conversation, which I should never wish you to decline. If you do not
allow gentlemen to become acquainted with you, you can never expect to
marry with attachment on either side.--Love is very seldom produced at
first sight; at least it must have, in that case, a very unjustifiable
foundation. True love is founded on esteem, in a correspondence of
tastes and sentiments, and steals on the heart imperceptibly.
There is one advice I shall leave you, to which I beg your particular
attention. Before your affections come to be in the least engaged to
any man, examine your tempers, your tastes, and your hearts, very
severely, and settle in your own minds, what are the requisites to your
happiness in a married state; and, as it is almost impossible that you
should get every thing you wish, come to a steady determination what
you are to consider as essential, and what may be sacrificed.
If you have hearts disposed by nature for love and friendship,
and possess those feelings which enable you to enter into all the
refinements and delicacies of these attachments, consider well, for
Heaven’s sake, and as you value your future happiness, before you give
them any indulgence. If you have the misfortune (for a very great
misfortune it commonly is to your sex) to have such a temper and such
sentiments deeply rooted in you, if you have spirit and resolution to
resist the solicitations of vanity, the persecution of friends (for you
will have lost the only friend that would never persecute you), and can
support the prospect of the many inconveniencies attending the state
of an old maid, which I formerly pointed out, then you may indulge
yourselves in that kind of sentimental reading and conversation which
is most correspondent to your feelings.
But if you find, on a strict self-examination, that marriage is
absolutely essential to your happiness, keep the secret inviolable in
your own bosoms, for the reason I formerly mentioned; but shun, as
you would do the most fatal poison, all that species of reading and
conversation which warms the imagination, which engages and softens
the heart, and raises the taste above the level of common life. If
you do otherwise, consider the terrible conflict of passions this may
afterwards raise in your breasts.
If this refinement once takes deep root in your minds, and you do
not obey its dictates, but marry from vulgar and mercenary views, you
may never be able to eradicate it entirely, and then it will embitter
all your married days. Instead of meeting with sense, delicacy,
tenderness, a lover, a friend, an equal companion, in a husband, you
may be tired with insipidity and dulness; shocked with indelicacy, or
mortified by indifference. You will find none to compassionate, or even
understand your sufferings; for your husbands may not use you cruelly,
and may give you as much money for your clothes, personal expense, and
domestic necessaries, as is suitable to their fortunes. The world would
therefore look on you as unreasonable women, and that did not deserve
to be happy, if you were not so.--To avoid these complicated evils, if
you are determined at all events to marry, I would advise you to make
all your reading and amusements of such a kind, as do not affect the
heart nor the imagination, except in the way of wit or humour.
I have no view by these advices to lead your tastes; I only want to
persuade you of the necessity of knowing your own minds, which, though
seemingly very easy, is what your sex seldom attain on many important
occasions in life, but particularly on this of which I am speaking.
There is not a quality I more anxiously wish you to possess, than that
collected decisive spirit, which rests on itself, which enables you
to see where your true happiness lies, and to pursue it with the most
determined resolution. In matters of business follow the advice of
those who know them better than yourselves, and in whose integrity you
can confide; but in matters of taste, that depend on your own feelings,
consult no one friend whatever, but consult your own hearts.
If a gentleman makes his addresses to you, or gives you reason to
believe he will do so, before you allow your affections to be engaged,
endeavour, in the most prudent and secret manner, to procure from your
friends every necessary piece of information concerning him; such as
his character for sense, his morals, his temper, fortune, and family;
whether it is distinguished for parts and worth, or for folly, knavery,
and loathsome hereditary diseases. When your friends inform you of
these, they have fulfilled their duty. If they go further, they have
not that deference for you which a becoming dignity on your part would
effectually command.
Whatever your views are in marrying, take every possible precaution
to prevent their being disappointed. If fortune, and the pleasure it
brings, are your aim, it is not sufficient that the settlements of a
jointure and children’s provisions be ample, and properly secured; it
is necessary that you should enjoy the fortune during your own life.
The principal security you can have for this will depend on your
marrying a good-natured, generous man, who despises money, and who will
let you live where you can best enjoy that pleasure, that pomp and
parade of life, for which you married him.
From what I have said, you will easily see that I could never pretend
to advise whom you should marry; but I can with great confidence advise
whom you should not marry.
Avoid a companion that may entail any hereditary disease on your
posterity, particularly (that most dreadful of all human calamities)
madness. It is the height of imprudence to run into such a danger, and
in my opinion, highly criminal.
Do not marry a fool; he is the most intractable of all animals; he is
led by his passions and caprices, and is incapable of hearing the voice
of reason. It may probably too hurt your vanity to have husbands for
whom you have reason to blush and tremble every time they open their
lips in company. But the worst circumstance that attends a fool, is his
constant jealousy of his wife being thought to govern him. This renders
it impossible to lead him, and he is continually doing absurd and
disagreeable things, for no other reason but to show he dares do them.
A rake is always a suspicious husband, because he has only known the
most worthless of your sex. He likewise entails the worst diseases on
his wife and children, if he has the misfortune to have any.
If you have a sense of religion yourselves, do not think of husbands
who have none. If they have tolerable understandings, they will be
glad that you have religion, for their own sakes, and for the sake
of their families; but it will sink you in their esteem. If they are
weak men, they will be continually teasing and shocking you about your
principles.--If you have children, you will suffer the most bitter
distress, in seeing all your endeavours to form their minds to virtue
and piety, all your endeavours to secure their present and eternal
happiness, frustrated and turned into ridicule.
As I look on your choice of a husband to be of the greatest
consequence to your happiness, I hope you will make it with the utmost
circumspection. Do not give way to a sudden sally of passion, and
dignify it with the name of love.--Genuine love is not founded in
caprice; it is founded in nature, on honourable views, on virtue, on
similarity of tastes and sympathy of souls.
If you have these sentiments, you will never marry any one, when you
are not in that situation, in point of fortune, which is necessary to
the happiness of either of you. What that competency may be, can only
be determined by your own tastes. It would be ungenerous in you to take
advantage of a lover’s attachment, to plunge him into distress; and if
he has any honour, no personal gratification will ever tempt him to
enter into any connexion which will render you unhappy. If you have as
much between you as to satisfy all your demands, it is sufficient.
I shall conclude with endeavouring to remove a difficulty which must
naturally occur to any woman of reflexion on the subject of marriage.
What is to become of all those refinements of delicacy, that dignity
of manners, which checked all familiarities, and suspended desire
in respectful and awful admiration? In answer to this, I shall only
observe, that if motives of interest or vanity have had any share in
your resolutions to marry, none of these chimerical notions will give
you any pain; nay, they will very quickly appear as ridiculous in your
own eyes, as they probably always did in the eyes of your husbands.
They have been sentiments which have floated in your imaginations, but
have never reached your hearts. But if these sentiments have been truly
genuine, and if you have had the singular happy fate to attach those
who understand them, you have no reason to be afraid.
Marriage, indeed, will at once dispel the enchantment raised by
external beauty; but the virtues and graces that first warmed the
heart, that reserve and delicacy which always left the lover something
further to wish, and often made him doubtful of your sensibility
or attachment, may and ought ever to remain. The tumult of passion
will necessarily subside; but it will be succeeded by an endearment,
that affects the heart in a more equal, more sensible, and tender
manner.--But I must check myself, and not indulge in descriptions that
may mislead you, and that too sensibly awake the remembrance of my
happier days, which, perhaps, it were better for me to forget for ever.
I have thus given you my opinion on some of the most important
articles of your future life, chiefly calculated for that period when
you are just entering the world. I have endeavoured to avoid some
peculiarities of opinion, which, from their contradiction to the
general practice of the world, I might reasonably have suspected were
not so well founded. But, in writing to you, I am afraid my heart has
been too full, and too warmly interested, to allow me to keep this
resolution. This may have produced some embarrassment, and some seeming
contradictions. What I have written has been the amusement of some
solitary hours, and has served to divert some melancholy reflexions.--I
am conscious I undertook a task to which I was very unequal; but I have
discharged a part of my duty.--You will at least be pleased with it, as
the last mark of your father’s love and attention.