“True self-love and social are the same:” 

That those passions which make the happiness of individuals tend directly to the general good of the species.

The beneficent Author of nature has made public and private happiness the same; man has in vain endeavored to divide them; but in the endeavor he has almost destroyed both.

’Tis with pain I say, that the business of legislation in most countries seems to have been to counter-work this wise order of providence, which has ordained, that we shall make others happy in being so ourselves.

This is in nothing so glaring as in the point on which not only the happiness, but the virtue of almost the whole human race is concerned:  I mean marriage; the restraints on which, in almost every country, not only tend to encourage celibacy, and a destructive libertinism the consequence of it, to give fresh strength to domestic tyranny, and subject the generous affections of uncorrupted youth to the guidance of those in whom every motive to action but avarice is dead; to condemn the blameless victims of duty to a life of indifference, of disgust, and possibly of guilt; but, by opposing the very spirit of our constitution, throwing property into a few hands, and favoring that excessive inequality, which renders one part of the species wretched, without adding to the happiness of the other; to destroy at once the domestic felicity of individuals, contradict the will of the Supreme Being, as clearly wrote in the book of nature, and sap the very foundations of the most perfect form of government on earth.

A pretty long-winded period this:  Bell would call it true Ciceronian, and quote

  “—­Rivers for a period of a mile.”

But to proceed.  The only equality to which parents in general attend, is that of fortune; whereas a resemblance in age, in temper, in personal attractions, in birth, in education, understanding, and sentiment, are the only foundations of that lively taste, that tender friendship, without which no union deserves the sacred name of marriage.

Timid, compliant youth may be forced into the arms of age and disease; a lord may invite a citizen’s daughter he despises to his bed, to repair a shattered fortune; and she may accept him, allured by the rays of a coronet:  but such conjunctions are only a more shameful species of prostitution.

Men who marry from interested motives are inexcusable; but the very modesty of women makes against their happiness in this point, by giving them a kind of bashful fear of objecting to such persons as their parents recommend as proper objects of their tenderness.

I am prevented by company from saying all I intended.

      Adieu!  Your faithful
          Ed. Rivers.

LETTER 210.

To Colonel Rivers.

Temple-house, Nov. 1.

You wrong me excessively, my dear Rivers, in accusing me of a natural levity in love and friendship.