Page:A Treatise concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed.djvu/56

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a kind of a Passion, and did not intend to be taken at her word.

However, notwithstanding all this, and notwithstanding she saw him in drink several times after that, and sometimes when he did not preserve his Temper, as he did then, yet this Lady married him after it all; And what followed? As she had reason to expect, so it prov'd; she was as compleatly miserable in a Husband as a married Life could well make any Woman be; for he proved not only drunken, but a passionate outragious Wretch in his drink, and that to her in particular.

It is true, he was very obliging and good-tempered out of his Excesses; but then, as he grew older, the Vice encreased upon him; till at last, so little made him drunk, and he was so seldom sober, that she had the most Vexations, and the least Intervals of Quiet that ever Lady had; and all this for want of obeying not only the intelligence of her faithful Friend, but even the kind discovery which Providence made to her, as it were, on purpose, and past her being able to doubt the truth of it; so that indeed she had no Body to blame.

But to return to the Case, and not to insist upon the drunkenness of a particular Person, here or there, which may be said to be an Accident to the Temper; but without this, the discording Tempers of the Party is as great, and as effectual a Cause of the abuse of the matrimonial Peace, as any thing else can be.

I have mentioned the sad Consequences of discording Constitutions, in a Chapter by it self, and which often occasions a great abuse of the matrimonial Duty, and particularly of the Marriage Bed; but that is not the Point I

am