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TO QUEEN MAB.
17

mending it, would be to replace the noisy puppies that infest our streets, by tigers and hyenas.

We now arrive at some of the most senseless and absurd jargon, that ever affected sensibility reduced to language—if that may be called language, which inverts its purpose, and confounds, instead of assisting, the understanding. I must quote the words, or I should be considered as creating shadows, for the purpose of dispelling them. He says—"if happiness be the object of morality, of all human unions and disunions; if the worthiness of every action is to be estimated by the quantity of pleasurable sensation it is calculated to produce, then the connection of the sexes is so long sacred, as it contributes to the comfort of the parties, and is naturally dissolved, when its evils are greater than its benefits. There is nothing immoral in this separation. Constancy has nothing virtuous in itself, independently of the pleasure which it confers, and partakes of the temporizing spirit of vice, in proportion as it endures tamely moral defects of magnitude in the object of its indiscreet choice. Love is free: To promise for ever to love the same woman, is not less absurd than to promise to believe

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