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A DISCOURSE OF MATRIMONY.

BY JEREMIAH SINGLETON, BACHELOR OF PHYSIC.

FORASMUCH as I, Jeremiah Singleton, Bachelor of Physic, did whilom, in this Miscellany, indite a certain Tractate or Treatise concerning Love, that phrenetic distemper, high time it now is that I should further discuss somewhat concerning its sequel-Matrimony. And let no creeping, cavilling critic object that I, being no less a bachelor in estate than in physic, am therefore unqualified by experience to discourse thereon. Whose sole experience shall profit him in this matter-unless, indeed, he be a Turk, and not a Christian; and so, possessing a diversity of wives, shall be enabled to recount the diverse ills of wedlock? For each particular husband, I take it, hath his particular plague; this being vexed with a shrew, that with a slattern, the other with a spendthrift, a busybody, or a babbler. Wherefore, the quiet contemplation of other men's evils shall more conduce to edification than the sad experience of one's own. And moreover, so besotted, for the most part, are married folks, that they see not, nor acknowledge their own miseries, but rather as comforts exult in them; even as that slavish monarch, who, as history doth relate, being captive, did hug his fetters for that they were of gold. Which persons, thus blinded, if haply I may awake, so that, their eyes being opened, they shall discern and bemoan their evil plight, I shall much rejoice.

It remembereth me that I did in my former treatise liken love unto an inflammation, and matrimony, its consequence, unto an adhesion, such as, even in a pleurisy, contiguous membranes do contract: yea truly; or rather, as when the learned Taliacotius did, on those by Nature or mischance deprived of the promontory of the face, engraft supplemental noses, fashioned out of alien flesh. For like as, in those cases, the temperament of the graft, oftentimes evil, was infused into the stock, wherefrom many mischiefs did ensue; even so when that clerkly Taliacotius, the priest, conjoineth a couple in matrimony, making of them twain one flesh, a man must thenceforth partake and tolerate all the humours of his wife, or else let him expect no peace. Whereunto shall I liken a married pair, when the husband jumpeth not with his wife's whims? Shall I say, unto a brace of hounds, contrarily tending, yet linked together; each, with a continual interchange of unharmonious howlings and savage snarlings and snappings, worrying and tormenting the other? Or dids't thou ever, gentle reader, behold a dog and a cat, which some unlucky schoolboy hath tied together by the tail! What barking, what spitting, what growling, what mewing; what biting, rending, and clawing of each other! To such, rather, would I compare an ill-matched couple; and where, truly, is the couple well matched? Upon earth? I would fain like to see them. Aloft? Nay, there, indeed, they marry not. Well, therefore, is it said, In cælo quies.

It is affirmed that marriage is honourable. Truly; and so is martyrdom: to hold else were unsound doctrine. But the honour

of wedlock I take not to be inherent; or why are anchorites so much esteemed? I rather judge it to be derivative, and due unto the practice of virtue; which, according to the ancients, is nothing else than fortitude under tribulation. And, oh, what fortitude doth matrimony ask of a man! What tolerance of unreason! What endurance of contradiction! What long-sufferance of taunts, and twittings, and scoldings, and vapours, and caprices; of pets and ill-tempers, yea, and, moreover, oftentimes of cuffings and scratchings! Wherein was the patience of Joв more manifest than in the matter of his wife? Wherein make we greater account of the wise Socrates than in that he suffered a Xantippe, who, as grave writers do report, did not only objurgate and cross him, but was wont even to box his ears? And to come down to modern times, wherefore should I speak of Mr. William Shakspeare and Mr. Milton, those famous poets, who albeit vexed with termagant wives, yet bare them with so equal a mind, as to pen, amid all their distractions, some of the most ingenious writings of their age?

Now the special evils of matrimony, beside those which all flesh is heir to, are those evils which are contracted by the fleshly addition or encumbrance, (as it is well called in the newspapers,) which a man taketh upon himself in a wife. And these evils do consist in the aforesaid humours, in which, through that addition, he is forced, as it were, to go shares,-as, humours of sickness, humours of sloth, humours of vanity, and of these last, what a multitude! I have known wives, sound in body, to speak in the vernacular, as a roach, who nevertheless (if, indeed, you would believe them) were ever ailing; now bemoaning a head-ache, now a back-ache, now a catching, now a darting, now a sinking, now a swimming, and other, the like fiddle-stickeries, and puddings, and fancies, unknown to Hippocrates and Galen; always piping and fretting, pining and whining, never owning themselves well. Dainty of appetite; nothing pleasing them out of conceit with their meat, yet quarrelling with their bread and butter. Out upon such taffeta mopsies! Then would they lounge and loll from morning till night on a lazy daybed, I mean a sofa,-salt-smelling, sighing and heighoing, in low spirits, forsooth! as they phrase it. Exhorted to bestir and rouse themselves, mincingly they protested that it would be their death; compelled by wholesome force to get up and bustle, straightway they would go into I know not what fits of hysterics. Concerning the treatment whereof doctors differ, my counsel is to let them alone. Then others have I known, never happy or contented but in gadding about to be seen; all their talk of ribbons; even giving or running after silly jig parties and dances; their heads full of nothing but the emptiness of fringes and filligrees. To all of which vanities, unless their husbands would give in, there were such poutings and sulkings, such cryings and dyings, such plaints and reproaches, that none but he who had witnessed the same would credit.

And now, how work these humours in the better half,—I mean the husband-of this fleshly conjunction? To the generation of acidity in the ill-stomaching soul; to the tainting of the temper with acrimony; to a feverish restlessness and disquiet of the mind,its rational past condemning what, for quietness' sake, it is constrained to allow; to a frequent wasting away of the body itself, to baldness and to greyness, from very care and anxiety; but oh!

worst of all! to a ruinous and deadly consumption of the chestI mean, to a phthisic of the strong-box, from day to day exhausted to supply these crotchets and whimsies. Excellently quoth Juvenal, the Roman poet,

"Prodiga non sentit pereuntem fœmina censum ;"

Which may thus, in plain English, and sad truth, be rendered, "The_lavish woman perceiveth not the decreasing income." No, indeed, not she, till all is gone, and nought else for her luckless lord remaineth but the workhouse or the gaol. Then taketh she on, and blubbereth, and whineth, and exclaimeth, and wringeth her hands, and accuseth fate and the stars; whereas she herself is the cruel fate, she the malign planet which hath wrought all these disasters. What! She could not dine but off plate, nor dress but in silks and satins, nor lie but on down, nor tread but on Turkish carpets, nor sit but on spring-cushions; no, not she: neither could she walk, forsooth, on her natural props and supporters, whereon even the very goose can waddle; but needs must she ride about in a gingerbread chariot, with a bewigged martlemas of a coachman in front, and a couple of bedizened, bepowdered knaves of footmen behind. No, truly! she must needs follow the fashions. Whither? marry, to the dogs. Nay, I lack patience with such good-for-noughts!

But, peradventure, I shall be told that all wives are not such as these queasy queans. Nor do I deny that there be, here and there, thrifty and notable housewives, well skilled to brew and bake, to darn, to sew, and to cook, given to industry, and withal gentle and patient; helps meet, indeed, unto their mates. Such a woman, doubtless, is as a crown unto her husband; but be it remembered that every, the easiest crown, doth in some sort gall the wearer. For, to go no farther, he that marrieth must needs look to a family; in the nursing, first, and thereafter in the rearing, whereof, what grievous charges must be borne! How much the leech or doctor (not without reason, let me say) doth suck up! and in keep and coddlements and comforts, what substance, not to speak of wages, that cormorant the monthly nurse devoureth! Oh the tea, oh the gin, oh the bread, the beef, and broken meat, and beer, with which she doth ingurgitate her corpus! And in bottled porter, and candles, and ales, and dainties, and kickshaws, I know not (thank Heaven !) how much is consumed by her mistress; but this I do know, that the forcing and stuffing even of the most reasonable, chiefly from the impertinence of meddling gossips, is far greater than nature requireth. And what grave person can endure to nurse babies and rock cradles? Now all this, at least, must he expect who thinketh to venture on Matrimony. Then cometh the clothing and schooling of children, whereof how grievous is the burden, let frantic fathers attest. Surely all these things are sufficient to drive a man mad, and how often they do suffice to that end, we see daily.

Concerning the horrible madness of jealousy, whereunto all married men are liable, and of the woeful causes for the same, (which prevail not seldom,) I trust to be pardoned for not speaking. As the poet Virgil did only, in a manner, glance at, and so to speak it, shirk the horrors of Tartarus, so shall I these "Nulli fas casto sceleratum

insistere limen;" which is as much as to say, "It befitteth not Jeremiah Singleton, Bachelor of Physic, to enter upon this subject."

Such and so many, and many more which space forbiddeth me to enumerate, being the miseries of wedlock, no wonder at the passes to which it driveth men. No marvel that it urgeth many well nigh to the hanging of themselves; especially such as marry widows. For it is said that marriage and hanging go by destiny; yea, often by the same, I take it; wherefore I account Venus the most pernicious of the stars. Nor is it strange that the unhappy husband should oftimes in his distraction rush to the pot-house, to the damage both of his health and his pocket, and thence returning the worse for liquor, that he should now and then belabour his wife; which, indeed, some lawyers hold that he hath a right to do, with a stick no bigger than his thumb. Yet is the practice disesteemed; and in the country parts, those who do chastise, or, as the vernacular phrase is, wallop, their wives, men do serenade with rough music, namely, of tongs and bones; the which in Hampshire is called "Skimmerton."

Sith Matrimony, once contracted, is incurable, but by that greatest of physicians, Death, very meet and by all means advisable it is that the cause thereof, Love, be timeously checked and removed. I take no account of such as do wed for gain's sake, seeing that I judge them to deserve all they get. The sole remedy for marriage that I know of is philosophy, and therein, as Mr. Shakspeare saith, "the patient must minister to himself;" -as did, amongst others, the venerable Mr. Hooker; as is set forth in his life by honest Isaac Walton. For the said Mr. Hooker, ailing in body, but more, I reckon, in mind, did suffer his sometime hostess, a Mrs. Churchman, to choose him a wife to comfort him; who indeed was no other than her own daughter, a prodigal and a vixen; and she turned out to be the plague of his life. Thus much of the judicious Hooker did I relate unto a facetious friend; who pleasantly remarked, that he was rather, in this case, the injudicious Hooked.

And thus much concerning Matrimony, whereof I shall say no more, than that nothing is more to be deplored, than that extreme, and I may say, bewitching comeliness which is the portion of so many of our damsels, and so potent a temptation thereunto: a temptation so strong, that none, even of the wisest, can be assured that he shall not be the next victim thereof; from which calamity, kind reader, if as yet in the estate of single blessedness, I wish thee preservation and deliverance!

MEMORIALS OF THE DEPARTED GREAT.

BY A MIDDLE-AGED MAN.

I was travelling in a post-chaise from Birmingham to Warwick, when the sound of village bells, and the sight of something very like the mast of a ship-" some tall admiral"-recalled to my bewildered remembrance that it must be May-day. May-day?-the first of May?-no!-that is over;-'tis the twelfth of the month, Anno Domini........... “ Yet, surely," I said to myself, as there seemed now, on driving into the village whence issued the peal of bells, some festivity going on. "Hallo, boy!" addressing a veteran of fifty-"postboy, draw up ;-what are all these country lads and lasses trudging along the road for ?—what's the occasion?"

"Occasion, sir?" answered the postboy, checking his hacks,"occasion? why-" he took some time to expound the word in his stupid Warwickshire head-" why, this 'ere 's May-day, sir."

"May-day?-by the way, so it is!--old May-day-the tears of old May-day-yes, you say right. And pray, postboy, what may be the name of this village, where they keep old May-day instead of new May-day? Why, we can't be very far from Warwick?"

"Three mile, sir," answered my veteran, laying his whip over the right shoulder of one of his nags, who had some remains of blood in him, and wanted to get on to the Black Swan at Warwick. "This is Atton, sir."

"Atton-oh, Hatton !-Yes,-very true, very good. Drive on slowly, and let us see what these good people are about."

And now a most cheerful and singular scene presented itself. To the right stood a grave, red-brick, substantial house, devoid of those picturesque gables, that ivied porch, and mossy, dilapidated, Queen-Anne's-bounty-wanting tenements, usually called parsonages in this remarkably liberal, devout country;-wanting, too, the healthy, proximate churchyard, kindly meant to chasten the curate, or vicar, by giving him and his seven children a taste of typhus fever; devoid, too, as I looked up at the windows, of any signs of those same dozens of children decreed occasionally to lean curates, but seldom granted to fat rectors;-devoid of the bars to nursery windows a quiet, orderly, prosperous, weather-proof abode. "Lucky man this! And this is," I muttered to myself, "positively the residence of Doctor Parr-Samuel Parr! It actually," I musingly exclaimed, "has received Sheridan beneath its roof-nurtured, too, his son! It has been the resort of the learned, of the political, of the great and fashionable-the home of Samuel Parr!" "Drive on, post boy," I added, after a few moments' reflection, half debating with myself whether I should not step out and leave a card for Dr. Parr; the blinds are down-all is as still as a dungeon. "The Doctor, I suppose," (such were my reflections,) "is from home: gone, perhaps, on some grave mission, perhaps to Holkham, to meet some political friends, full of that impossible chimera, Reform in Parliament,-perhaps to some visitation,-or, perhaps, to one of the Universities; or, at all events, probably engaged on some important business."

VOL. XVII.

X

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