'I wish the Lady all Happiness and a better Husband, and if it be for her Satisfaction, one who has thought less of the Matter; not but that I have a very good Opinion of Matrimony, and think of it with Pleasure, as hoping one time or other to enter into its Lists, but I now wait with Patience till my Circumstances or Thought vary. One Thing I would not have you mistaken in, is, that I do not mean, that your Relation will be thus expensive to me, more than any other, only that whenever I marry, let her be who she will, I must necessarily (if She has no more Fortune than you propose) expend considerably more than 200_l._ a year on her, above the Income of her Fortune, and at present I cannot persuade myself to be at so great an Expense, for the value of trying a dangerous Experiment, whether the Pleasures of Matrimony are yearly worth that Sum.'
And all this is submitted to the proposer by his 'Obliged and Humble Servant.'
The whole question of marriage, with its arguments for and against, seems to have been as engrossing a topic amongst English men and women in the early part of the eighteenth century as it certainly is with us now, and the bachelor's pamphlet brought forward at least two replies, which we found bound up with the original. One of these, purporting to be by the lady herself, and signed 'Philogamia,' may be dismissed in a few words; its arguments are neither serious nor to the point, and such wit as there is is of a low order, and too much in the _tu quoque_ style to be amusing. The second rejoinder is by the 'Woman's Advocate,' and is probably not, as it pretends, written by a man on behalf of women in general, but rather by an irritated member of the weaker sex, who finds herself and her fellows insulted _en masse_ by the bachelor's refusal to marry one of them.
The 'Advocate' takes the various items of the 'Batchelor's Estimate' one by one, and proceeds to demolish them to the best of her ability, sometimes with a certain degree of success, due, we fancy, to the more intimate knowledge of housekeeping details naturally possessed by a woman. She at once attacks him on the subject of house-rent, and with truly feminine malice reminds him how she has often heard him praise a friend's house rented at £24, and declare that he 'could wish for nothing better.' This rather reminds us of a young lady who advocated the claims of a somewhat uninteresting young man by saying he would make 'such a delightful brother-in-law.'