insipid duties? Oh, my _Sylvia_, shall a husband (whose insensibility
will call those raptures of joy! Those heavenly blisses! The drudgery
of life) shall he I say receive them? While your _Philander_, with the
very thought of the excess of pleasure the least possession would
afford, faints over the paper that brings here his eternal vows.

Oh! Where, my _Sylvia_, lies the undoing then? My quality and fortune
are of the highest rank amongst men, my youth gay and fond, my soul
all soft, all love; and all _Sylvia_'s! I adore her, I am sick of
love, and sick of life, till she yields, till she is all mine!

You say, my _Sylvia_, I am married, and there my happiness is
shipwrecked; but _Sylvia_, I deny it, and will not have you think it:
no, my soul was married to yours in its first creation; and only
_Sylvia_ is the wife of my sacred, my everlasting vows; of my solemn
considerate thoughts, of my ripened judgement, my mature
considerations. The rest are all repented and forgot, like the hasty
follies of unsteady youth, like vows breathed in anger, and die
perjured as soon as vented, and unregarded either of heaven or man.
Oh! why should my soul suffer for ever, why eternal pain for the
unheedy, short-lived sin of my unwilling lips? Besides, this fatal
thing called wife, this unlucky sister, this _Myrtilla_, this stop to
all my heaven, that breeds such fatal differences in our affairs, this
_Myrtilla_, I say, first broke her marriage-vows to me; I blame her
not, nor is it reasonable I should; she saw the young _Cesario_, and
loved him. _Cesario_, whom the envying world in spite of prejudice
must own, has irresistible charms, that godlike form, that sweetness
in his face, that softness in his eyes and delicate mouth; and every
beauty besides, that women dote on, and men envy: that lovely
composition of man and angel! with the addition of his eternal youth