s names and splendid alliances, or of calling in, upon
any domestick controversy, the overbearing assistance of powerful
relations. Our fortune was equally suitable, so that we meet without any
of those obligations, which always produce reproach or suspicion of
reproach, which, though they may be forgotten in the gaities of the
first month, no delicacy will always suppress, or of which the
suppression must be considered as a new favour, to be repaid by tameness
and submission, till gratitude takes the place of love, and the desire
of pleasing degenerates by degrees into the fear of offending.

The settlements caused no delay; for we did not trust our affairs to the
negociation of wretches, who would have paid their court by multiplying
stipulations. Tranquilla scorned to detain any part of her fortune from
him into whose hands she delivered up her person; and Hymenaeus thought
no act of baseness more criminal than his who enslaves his wife by her
own generosity, who by marrying without a jointure, condemns her to all
the dangers of accident and caprice, and at last boasts his liberality,
by granting what only the indiscretion of her kindness enabled him to
withhold. He therefore received on the common terms the portion which
any other woman might have brought him, and reserved all the exuberance
of acknowledgment for those excellencies which he has yet been able to
discover only in Tranquilla.

We did not pass the weeks of courtship like those who consider
themselves as taking the last draught of pleasure, and resolve not to
quit the bowl without a surfeit, or who know themselves about to set
happiness to hazard, and endeavour to lose their sense of danger in the
ebriety of perpetual amusement, and whirl round the gulph before they
sink. Hymenaeus often repeated a medical axiom, that _the succours of
sickness ought not to be wasted in health_. We know that however our
eyes may yet sparkle, and our hearts bound at the presence of each
other, the time of listlessness and satiety, of peevishness and
discontent, must come at last, in which we shall be driven for relief to
shows and recreations; that the uniformity of life must be sometimes
diversified, and the vacuities of conversation sometimes supplied. We
rejoice in the reflection that we have stores of novelty yet
unexhausted, which may be opened when repletion shall call for change,
and gratifications yet untasted, by which life, when it shall become
vapid or bitter,