y their own good
liking, there is so much fondling and fooling, that it hinders
young people from minding their business. I must therefore desire
you to change your note, and instead of advising us old folks, who
perhaps have more wit than yourself, to let Sylvia know, that she
ought to act like a dutiful daughter, and marry the man that she
does not care for. Our great-grandmothers were all bid to marry
first, and love would come afterwards; and I don't see why their
daughters should follow their own inventions. I am resolved
Winifred shan't.

"Yours," &c.

This letter is a natural picture of ordinary contracts, and of the
sentiments of those minds that lie under a kind of intellectual
rusticity. This trifling occasion made me run over in my imagination
the many scenes I have observed of the married condition, wherein the
quintessence of pleasure and pain are represented as they accompany that
state, and no other. It is certain, there are a thousand thousand like
the above-mentioned yeoman and his wife, who are never highly pleased or
distasted in their whole lives: but when we consider the more informed
part of mankind, and look upon their behaviour, it then appears that
very little of their time is indifferent, but generally spent in the
most anxious vexation, or the highest satisfaction. Shakespeare has
admirably represented both the aspects of this state in the most
excellent tragedy of "Othello." In the character of Desdemona, he runs
through all the sentiments of a virtuous maid and a tender wife. She is
captivated by his virtue, and faithful to him, as well from that motive,
as regard to her own honour. Othello is a great and noble spirit, misled
by the villany of a false friend to suspect her innocence, and resents
it accordingly. When after the many instances of passion the wife is
told her husband is jealous, her simplicity makes her incapable of
believing it, and say, after such circumstances as would drive another
woman into distraction,

"_I think the sun where he was born
Drew all such humours from him._"[319]

This opinion of him is so just, that his noble and tender heart beats
itself to pieces before he can affront her with the mention of his
jealousy; and owns, this suspicion has blotted out all the sense of
glory and happiness which before it was possessed with, when he laments
himself i