…I dined on a beef pudding and cabbage. My late servant stayed with me all day and aired all my wife’s clothes.
Sam Jenner and I played a few games of cribbage in the evening; I neither won or lost. He stayed all night. At home all day and pretty busy, but yet my mind is quite tumultuous, hardly knowing which way to pursue or what way of life to engage in. To keep house with servants in the business I am situated in is not either agreeable to my naturel inclination or advantageous to my interest. No, it is not, for to the one it is quite different from, and the other I doubt itis greatly prejudicial to.
At the same time I doubt my trade will hardly answer the expenses of a family which might in all probability be the consequence of marriage. Though undoubtedly could I meet with a virtuous and discreet girl (one whose person I could like), who had taken more care to adorn the internal than external parts, I say with such a one I should prefer marriage before a single life, a life in my opinion agreeable to the dictates of nature, reason and religion. For agreeable to the apostle marriage is honorable in all men and the bed undefiled, though marriage I doubt in this licentious and libertine age is too oft entered with lucrative views or to gratify some inordinate passion, both of which I presume are contrary to the real institution of marriage. For in my mind virtue and as sincere love or friendship for each other seems the only basis to build a lasting happiness upon in the marriage state. Then so long as life continues, so long will happiness and love continue to increase. Happy, for ever happy, beyond the power of imagination to describe, are they whose lot it is, happy, may we presume, to all eternity.