"His and your Unknown," &c.
This oversight of a grass-plot in my friend's greenhouse, puts me in mind of a like inconsistency in a celebrated picture, where Moses is represented as striking a rock, and the Children of Israel quenching their thirst at the waters that flow from it, and run through a beautiful landscape of groves and meadows, which could not flourish in a place where water was to have been found only by a miracle.
The next letter comes to me from a Kentish yeoman, who is very angry with me for my advice to parents, occasioned by the amours of Sylvia and Philander, as related in my paper, No. 185:
"Squire Bickerstaff,
"I don't know by what chance one of your Tatlers is got into my family, and has almost turned the brains of my eldest daughter Winifred, who has been so undutiful as to fall in love of her own head, and tells me a foolish heathen story that she has read in your paper to persuade me to give my consent. I am too wise to let children have their own wills in a business like marriage. It is a matter in which neither I myself, nor any of my kindred, were ever humoured. My wife and I never pretended to love one another like your Sylvias and Philanders; and yet if you saw our fireside, you would be satisfied we are not always a-squabbling. For my part, I think that where man and woman come together by 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 in the warm allusions of a mind accustomed to entertainments so very different from the pangs of jealousy and revenge. How moving is his sorrow, when he cries out as follows:
"I had been happy, if the general camp,
Pioneers and all, had tasted her sweet body,
So I had nothing known. Oh now! for ever
Farewell the tranquil mind! Farewell content,
Farewell the plumèd troops, and the big wars,
That make ambition virtue! Oh farewell!
Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, th' ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!
And oh ye mortal engines! whose rude throats
The immortal Jove's dread clamours counterfeit,
Farewell! Othello's occupation's gone.[320]"