Grocott & Ward, comps. Grocott’s Familiar Quotations, 6th ed. 189-?.
Marriage
Ah me! when shall I marry me?
Lovers are plenty but fail to relieve me.
Goldsmith.—A Song.
I would be married, but I’d have no wife;
I would be married to a single life.
Crashaw.—On Marriage.
Art thou married? O thou horribly virtuous woman!
Colley Cibber.—The Comical Lovers, Act I. Scene 1.
Though fools spurn Hymen’s gentle pow’rs,
We who improve his golden hours,
By sweet experience know,
That marriage, rightly understood,
Gives to the tender and the good
A paradise below.
Cotton.—The Fireside, Verse V.
I am to be married within three days—married past redemption.
Dryden.—Marriage à la Mode, Act I. Scene 1.
When we are alone, we walk like lions in a room, she one way and I another.
Dryden.—Marriage à la Mode, Act I. Scene 1. Colley Cibber.—The Comical Lovers, Act I.
Thus grief still treads upon the heels of pleasure.
Marry’d in haste, we may repent at leisure.
Congreve.—The Old Bachelor, Act V. Scene 8.
I will marry her, sir, at your request; but if there be no great love in the beginning, yet Heaven may decrease it upon better acquaintance:——I hope, upon familiarity will grow more contempt;———I will marry her, that I am freely dissolved, and dissolutely.
Shakespeare.—Merry Wives of Windsor, Act I. Scene 1. (Slender to Shallow.)
As a walled town is more worthier than a village, so is the forehead of a married man more honourable than the bare brow of a bachelor.
Shakespeare.—As You Like It, Act III. Scene 3.
Let o’er thy house some chosen maid preside,
Till Heaven decrees to bless thee in a bride.
Pope’s Homer, The Odyssey, Book XV. Line 29.
O! when meet now
Such pairs, in love and mutual honour join’d?
Milton.—Paradise Lost, Book VIII. Line 57.
She that weds well will wisely match her love,
Nor be below her husband nor above.
Ovid.—Heroides, Epi. IX. Line 32.
Let still the woman take
An elder than herself; so wears she to him,
So sways she level in her husband’s heart.
For, boy, however we do praise ourselves,
Our fancies are more giddy and infirm,
More longing, wavering, sooner lost and won,
Than women’s are.
Shakespeare.—Twelfth Night, Act II. Scene 4.
We’ll try the gods again; for, wise men say,
Marriage and obsequies do not suit one day.
Beaumont and Fletcher.—The Prophetess, Act II. Scene 3.
To-morrow yet would reap to-day,
As we wear blossoms of the dead;
Earn well the thrifty months nor wed
Raw haste, half sister to delay.
Tennyson.—Love Thou the Land, last Verse.