"It is what we must all come to at last. I see you are hankering
after it, and I confess I have done so for a long time past.
We are, however, past that period [Irving was thirty-two] when a man
marries suddenly and inconsiderately. We may be longer making a
choice, and consulting the convenience and concurrence of easy
circumstances, but we shall both come to it sooner or later.
I therefore recommend you to marry without delay. You have
sufficient means, connected with your knowledge and habits of
business, to support a genteel establishment, and I am certain that
as soon as you are married you will experience a change in your
ideas. All those vagabond, roving propensities will cease. They
are the offspring of idleness of mind and a want of something to fix
the feelings. You are like a bark without an anchor, that drifts
about at the mercy of every vagrant breeze or trifling eddy. Get a
wife, and she'll anchor you. But don't marry a fool because she his
a pretty face, and don't seek after a great belle. Get such a girl
as Mary----, or get her if you can; though I am afraid she has
still an unlucky kindness for poor-----, which will stand in the
way of her fortunes. I wish to God they were rich, and married, and
happy!"

The business reverses which befell the Irving brothers, and which drove
Washington to the toil of the pen, and cast upon him heavy family
responsibilities, defeated his plans of domestic happiness in marriage.
It was in this same year, 1816, when the fortunes of the firm were daily
becoming more dismal, that he wrote to Brevoort, upon the report that the
latter was likely to remain a bachelor: "We are all selfish beings.
Fortune by her tardy favors and capricious freaks seems to discourage all
my matrimonial resolves, and if I am doomed to live an old bachelor, I am
anxious to have good company. I cannot bear that all my old companions