When I censured a gentleman of my acquaintance for marrying a second
time, as it shewed a disregard of his first wife, he said, 'Not at all,
Sir. On the contrary, were he not to marry again, it might be concluded
that his first wife had given him a disgust to marriage; but by taking a
second wife he pays the highest compliment to the first, by shewing that
she made him so happy as a married man, that he wishes to be so a second
time.' So ingenious a turn did he give to this delicate question. And
yet, on another occasion, he owned that he once had almost asked a
promise of Mrs. Johnson that she would not marry again, but had checked
himself. Indeed, I cannot help thinking, that in his case the request
would have been unreasonable; for if Mrs. Johnson forgot, or thought it
no injury to the memory of her first love,--the husband of her youth and
the father of her children,--to make a second marriage, why should
she be precluded from a third, should she be so inclined? In Johnson's
persevering fond appropriation of his Tetty, even after her decease,
he seems totally to have overlooked the prior claim of the honest
Birmingham trader.
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