"If a tale reaches her ears of a wife who has failed of her duty, or if the public newspapers record a divorce, then she awakens her husband to a sense of his superior happiness, and her own irreproachable virtue. O Charles, the woman who, reposing on the laurels of her boasted virtue, allows herself to be a disobliging, a peevish, a gloomy, a discontented companion, defeats one great end of the institution, which is happiness. The wife who violates the marriage vow, is indeed more criminal; but the very magnitude of her crime emancipates her husband; while she who makes him not dishonorable, but wretched, fastens on him a misery for life, from which no laws can free him, and under which religion alone can support him." We continued talking, till we reached home, on the multitude of marriages in which the parties are "joined not matched," and where the term union is a miserable misnomer. I endeavored to turn all these new acquaintances to account, and considered myself at every visit I made, as taking a lesson for my own conduct. I beheld the miscarriages of others, not only with concern for the individual, but as beacons to light me on my way. It was no breach of charity to use the aberrations of my acquaintance for the purpose of making my own course more direct. I took care however, never to lose sight of the humbling consideration that my own deviations were equally liable to become the object of their animadversion, if the same motive had led them to the same scrutiny. I remained some weeks longer in town, indulging myself in all its safe sights, and all its sober pleasures. I examined whatever was new in art, or curious in science. I found out the best pictures, saw the best statues, explored the best museums, heard the best speakers in the courts of law, the best preachers in the church, and the best orators in parliament; attended the best lectures, and visited the best company, in the most correct, though not always the most fashionable sense of the term. I associated with many learned, sensible, and some pious men, commodities with which London, with all its faults, abounds, perhaps, more than any other place on the habitable globe. I became acquainted with many agreeable, well informed, valuable women, with a few who even seemed in a good measure to live above the world while they were living in it.