er, there was a festival of life allowed
the new-married, a sort of intermediate state between celibacy and
matrimony, which continued certain days. During that time,
entertainments, equipages, and other circumstances of rejoicing, were
encouraged, and they were permitted to exceed the common mode of living,
that the bride and bridegroom might learn from such freedoms of
conversation to run into a general conduct to each other, made out of
their past and future state, so to temper the cares of the man and the
wife with the gaieties of the lover and the mistress.

In those wise ages the dignity of life was kept up, and on the
celebration of such solemnities there were no impertinent whispers and
senseless interpretations put upon the unaffected cheerfulness or
accidental seriousness of the bride; but men turned their thoughts upon
the general reflections, upon what issue might probably be expected from
such a couple in the succeeding course of their life, and felicitated
them accordingly upon such prospects.

I must confess, I cannot from any ancient manuscripts, sculptures, or
medals, deduce the rise of our celebrated custom of throwing the
stocking; but have a faint memory of an account a friend gave me of an
original picture in the palace of Aldobrandini in Rome. This seems to
show a sense of this affair very different from what is usual among us.
It is a Grecian wedding, and the figures represented are, a person
offering sacrifice, a beautiful damsel dancing, and another playing on
the harp. The bride is placed in her bed, the bridegroom sits at the
foot of it, with an aspect which intimates his thoughts were not only
entertained with the joys with which he was surrounded, but also with a
noble gratitude, and divine pleasure in the offering, which was then
made to the gods to invoke their influence on his new condition. There
appears in the face of the woman a mixture of fear, hope, and modesty;
in the bridegroom, a well-governed rapture. As you see in great spirits
grief which discovers itself the more by forbearing tears and
complaints, you may observe also the highest joy is too big for
utterance, the tongue being of all the organs the least capable of
expressing such a circumstance. The nuptial torch, the bower, the
marriage song, are all particulars which we meet with in the allusions
of the ancient writers; and in every one of them something is to be
observed which denotes their industry to aggrandise and ador