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Headlong Hall by Thomas Love Peacock
page 112 of 122 (91%)
Females, condemned during the whole flower of their youth to a worse
than monastic celibacy, irrevocably debarred from the hope to which
their first affections pointed, will, at a certain period of life, as
the natural delicacy of taste and feeling is gradually worn away by
the attrition of society, become willing to take up with any coxcomb
or scoundrel, whom that merciless and mercenary gang of cold-blooded
slaves and assassins, called, in the ordinary prostitution of language
_friends_, may agree in designating as a _prudent choice_. Young men,
on the other hand, are driven by the same vile superstitions from the
company of the most amiable and modest of the opposite sex, to that of
those miserable victims and outcasts of a world which dares to call
itself virtuous, whom that very society whose pernicious institutions
first caused their aberrations,--consigning them, without one tear of
pity or one struggle of remorse, to penury, infamy, and
disease,--condemns to bear the burden of its own atrocious
absurdities! Thus, the youth of one sex is consumed in slavery,
disappointment, and spleen; that of the other, in frantic folly and
selfish intemperance: till at length, on the necks of a couple so
enfeebled, so perverted, so distempered both in body and soul, society
throws the yoke of marriage: that yoke which, once rivetted on the
necks of its victims, clings to them like the poisoned garments of
Nessus or Medea. What can be expected from these ill-assorted
yoke-fellows, but that, like two ill-tempered hounds, coupled by a
tyrannical sportsman, they should drag on their indissoluble fetter,
snarling and growling, and pulling in different directions? What can
be expected for their wretched offspring, but sickness and suffering,
premature decrepitude, and untimely death? In this, as in every other
institution of civilised society, avarice, luxury, and disease
constitute the TRIANGULAR HARMONY of the life of man. Avarice conducts
him to the abyss of toil and crime: luxury seizes on his ill-gotten
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