d ruin; and these were
greatly facilitated by the opportunities that occurred of being united
instantaneously by the ceremony of marriage, in the first transport of
passion, before the destined victim had time to cool or deliberate on
the subject. For this pernicious purpose, there was a band of profligate
miscreants, the refuse of the clergy, dead to every sentiment of
virtue, abandoned to all sense of decency and decorum, for the most part
prisoners for debt or delinquency, and indeed the very outcasts of human
society, who hovered about the verge of the Fleet-prison to intercept
customers, plying like porters for employment, and performed the
ceremony of marriage without license or question, in cellars, garrets,
or ale-houses, to the scandal of religion, and the disgrace of that
order which they professed. The ease with which this ecclesiastical
sanction was obtained, and the vicious disposition of those wretches,
open to the practices of fraud and corruption, were productive of
polygamy, indigence, conjugal infidelity, prostitution, and every curse
that could embitter the married state. A remarkable case of this nature
having fallen under the cognizance of the peers, in an appeal from an
inferior tribunal, that house ordered the judges to prepare a new bill
for preventing such abuses; and one was accordingly framed, under
the auspices of lord Hardwicke, at that time lord high chancellor
of England. In order to anticipate the bad effects of clandestine
marriages, this new statute enacted, that the banns should be regularly
published three successive Sundays, in the church of the parish where
the parties dwell; that no license should be granted to marry in any
place, where one of the parties has not dwelt at least a month, except
a special license by the archbishop; that if any marriage should be
solemnized in any other place than a church or a chapel without a
special license, or in a public chapel without having published the
banns, or obtained a license of some person properly qualified, the
marriage should he void, and the person who solemnized it transported
for seven years; that marriages by license, of parties under age,
without consent of parent or guardian, should be null and void, unless
the party under age be a widow, and the parent refusing consent a widow
married again: that when the consent of a mother or guardian is refused
from caprice, or such parent or guardian be _non compos mentis_, or
beyond sea, t