From “I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer”: Letters on Love and Marriage from the World’s First Personal Advice Column, edited by Mary Beth Norton, which will be published next month by Princeton University Press. These entries originally appeared in the Athenian Mercury, a newspaper in London, between 1691 and 1694.
q: There are two ladies in love with me to the degree that nothing will satisfy them but marrying me. They both are content to take each other as a partner rather than lose me, yet fearing it’s a sin, we know not what to do but will await your advice.
a: It’s a hundred to one that you will not be liked as well after marriage as before, and it’s probable you won’t much like the prohibition of one woman or the other. Therefore, you’d better try them out first and afterward let her take you that likes you best.
q: A lady of good birth and fortune has granted some private favors to me, but so discreetly as to preserve her reputation. A friend of mine courts her honorably and desires me to tell him my opinion of her virtue. How shall I behave?
a: If by that expression “some private favors” be meant what everyone will suspect that reads the question, all the answer we’ll give is: marry her quickly yourself, for until that’s done, whatever fine names you put upon the matter, you’re a ??? and she’s a ???.
q: I have long continued in a very vicious course of living, rendering myself incapable of resisting any temptation. First I was guilty of excessive drinking that led to all other mischiefs. It is my misfortune to have contracted too great a familiarity with a woman who endeavors chiefly to seduce me and diligently uses all her insinuating charms and deluding stratagems. Thus, I commit what is afterward the abhorrence of my soul, knowing that while I embrace her in my arms, I only embrace my ruin. How shall I disengage myself?
a: That fornication is damnable without repentance is believed by all but papists and atheists. And as it’s plain there’s no repentance without amendment, we expect no amendment while you are near her. You ought to flee the fair destroyer, though it were to the ends of the earth.
