you have given her the credit of being called by
your name: if you have a settled place of abode, and have received and
paid visits in her company, as your wife: if she has brought you children
--you will allow that these are strong obligations upon you in the
world's eye, as well as to your own heart, against tearing yourself from
such close connections. She will stick to you as your skin: and it will
be next to flaying yourself to cast her off.

Even if there be cause for it, by infidelity, she will have managed ill,
if she have not her defenders. Nor did I ever know a cause or a person
so bad, as to want advocates, either from ill-will to the one, or pity to
the other: and you will then be thought a hard-hearted miscreant: and
even were she to go off without credit to herself, she will leave you as
little; especially with all those whose good opinion a man would wish to
cultivate.

Well, then, shall this poor privilege, that we may part with a woman if
we will, be deemed a balance for the other inconveniencies? Shall it be
thought by us, who are men of family and fortune, an equivalent for
giving up equality of degree; and taking for the partner of our bed, and
very probably more than the partner in our estates, (to the breach of all
family-rule and order,) a low-born, a low-educated creature, who has not
brought any thing into the common stock; and can possibly make no returns
for the solid benefits she receives, but those libidinous ones, which a
man cannot boast of, but to his disgrace, nor think of, but to the shame
of both?

Moreover, as the man advances in years, the fury of his libertinism will
go off. He will have different aims and pursuits, which will diminish
his appetite to ranging, and make such a regular life as the matrimonial
and family life, palatable to him, and every day more palatable.

If he has children, and has reason to think them his, and if his lewd
courses have left him any estate, he will have cause to regret the
restraint his boasted liberty has laid him under, and the valuable
privilege it has deprived him of; when he finds that it must descend to
some relation, for whom, whether near or distant, he cares not one
farthing; and who perhaps (if a man of virtue) has held him in the
utmost contempt for his dissolute life.

And were we to suppose his estate in his power to bequeath as he pleases;
why should a man resolve, for the gratifying of his foolish humour only,
to bastardize h