I have very long entertain’d an Ambition to make the Word Wife the most agreeable and delightful Name in Nature.  If it be not so in it self, all the wiser Part of Mankind from the Beginning of the World to this Day has consented in an Error:  But our Unhappiness in England has been, that a few loose Men of Genius for Pleasure, have turn’d it all to the Gratification of ungovern’d Desires, in spite of good Sense, Form and Order; when, in truth, any Satisfaction beyond the Boundaries of Reason, is but a Step towards Madness and Folly.  But is the Sense of Joy and Accomplishment of Desire no way to be indulged or attain’d? and have we Appetites given us not to be at all gratify’d?  Yes certainly.  Marriage is an Institution calculated for a constant Scene of as much Delight as our Being is capable of.  Two Persons who have chosen each other out of all the Species, with design to be each other’s mutual Comfort and Entertainment, have in that Action bound themselves to be good-humour’d, affable, discreet, forgiving, patient and joyful, with respect to each other’s Frailties and Perfections, to the End of their Lives.  The wiser of the two (and it always happens one of them is such) will for her or his own sake, keep things from Outrage with the utmost Sanctity.  When this Union is thus preserved (as I have often said) the most indifferent Circumstance administers Delight.  Their Condition is an endless Source of new Gratifications.  The married Man can say, If I am unacceptable to all the World beside, there is one whom I entirely love, that will receive me with Joy and Transport, and think herself obliged to double her Kindness and Caresses of me from the Gloom with which she sees me overcast.  I need not dissemble the Sorrow of my Heart to be agreeable there, that very Sorrow quickens her Affection.

This Passion towards each other, when once well fixed, enters into the very Constitution, and the Kindness flows as easily and silently as the Blood in the Veins.  When this Affection is enjoy’d in the most sublime Degree, unskilful Eyes see nothing of it; but when it is subject to be chang’d, and has an Allay in it that may make it end in Distaste, it is apt to break into Rage, or overflow into Fondness, before the rest of the World.

Uxander and Viramira are amorous and young, and have been married these two Years; yet do they so much distinguish each other in Company, that in your Conversation with the Dear Things you are still put to a Sort of Cross-Purposes.  Whenever you address your self in ordinary Discourse to Viramira, she turns her Head another way, and the Answer is made to the dear Uxander:  If you tell a merry Tale, the Application is still directed to her Dear; and when she should commend you, she says to him, as if he had spoke it, That is, my Dear, so pretty—­This puts me in mind of what I have somewhere read in the admired Memoirs of the famous Cervantes, where, while honest Sancho Panca is putting some necessary humble Question concerning Rozinante, his Supper, or his Lodgings, the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance is ever improving the harmless lowly Hints of his Squire to the poetical Conceit, Rapture and Flight, in Contemplation of the dear Dulcinea of his Affections.