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From the same to the same, on Marriage
DEAR DAUGHTERS: I could never pretend to advise whom you should marry; but I can with confidence advise whom you should not marry.
Avoid a companion who may entail any hereditary disease on your posterity; particularly that most dreadful of all human calamities, madness. It is the height of imprudence to run into such danger; and, in my opinion, highly criminal.
Do not marry a fool; he is the most untractable of all animals; he is led by his passions and caprices, and is incapable of hearing the voice of reason. It may probably, too, hurt your vanity to have husbands for whom you have reason to blush and tremble every time they open their lips in company. But the worst circumstance that attends a fool is, his constant jealousy of his wife's being thought to govern him. This renders it impossible to lead him, and he is continually doing absurd and disagreeable things, for no other reason but to show he dares to do them. A rake is always a suspicious husband, because he has only known the most worthless of our sex. He likewise entails the worst of diseases on his wife and children, if he has the misfortune to have any.
If you have a sense of religion yourselves, do not think of husbands who have none. If they have tolerable understandings, they will be glad that you have religion, for their own sake, and for the sake of their families. If they are weak men, they will be continually teasing and shocking you about your principles. If you have children, you will suffer the most bitter distress in seeing all your endeavors to form their minds to virtue and piety, all your endeavors to secure their present and eternal happiness, frustrated and turned into ridicule.
As I look on your choice of a husband to be of the greatest consequence to your happiness, I hope you will make it with the utmost circumspection. Do not give way to a sudden sally of passion, and dignify it with the name of love. Genuine love is not founded in caprice; it is founded in nature, on honorable views and virtues, on similarity of taste and sympathy of soul. If you have these sentiments, you will never marry any one when you are not in that situation, in point of fortune, which is necessary to the happiness of either of you. What that competency may be, can only be determined by your own tastes. It would be ungenerous in you to take advantage of a lover's attachment to plunge him into distress; and if he has any honor, no personal gratification will ever tempt him to enter into any connection which will render you unhappy. If you have as much between you as will satisfy all your demands, it is sufficient. I shall conclude with endeavoring to remove a difficulty which must occur to any woman of reflection, on the subject of marriage.
What is to become of all those refinements of delicacy, that dignity of manner which checked all familiarities, and suspended desire in respectful and awful admiration? In answer to this I shall only observe, that if motives of interest or vanity have any share in your resolutions to marry, none of these chimerical notions will give you any pain; nay, they will very quickly appear as ridiculous in your own eyes as they probably always do in the eyes of your husband. They have been sentiments which floated in your imaginations, but have never reached your hearts. But if these sentiments have been truly genuine, and if you have had the singularly happy fate to attach those who understand them, you have no reason to be afraid.
I have thus given you my opinion on some of the most important articles of your future life, chiefly calculated for that period when you are just entering the world. But in writing to you, I am afraid my heart has been too full and too warmly interested to allow me to keep this resolution. This may have produced some embarrassment, and some seeming contradictions. What I have written has been the amusement of some solitary hours, and has served to divert some melancholy reflections. I am conscious I undertook a task to which I was very unequal; but I have discharged a part of my duty. You will at least be pleased with it, as the last mark of your father's love and attention. I am your affectionate father.