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The Vicar of Wakefield, Together With She Stoops to Conquer and the Deserted Village
The Vicar of Wakefield Together With She Stoops to Conquer and the Deserted Village Author:Oliver Goldsmith General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1905 Original Publisher: The Amalgamated Press, ltd. Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com w... more »here you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER II FAMILY MISFORTUNES. THE LOSS OF FORTUNE ONLY SERVES TO INCREASE THE PRIDE OF THE WORTHY The temporal concerns of our family were chiefly committed to my wife's management; as to the spiritual, I took them entirely under my own direction. The profits of my living, which amounted to but thirty-five pounds a year, I made over to the orphans and widows of the clergy of our diocese ; for having a fortune of my own, I was careless of temporalities, and felt a secret pleasure in doing my duty without reward. I also set a resolution of keeping no curate, and of being acquainted with every man in the parish, exhorting the married men to temperance, and the bachelors to matrimony ; so that in a few years it was a common saying, that there were three strange wants at Wakefield, a parson wanting pride, young men wanting wives, and ale-houses wanting customers. Matrimony was always one of my favourite topics, and I wrote several sermons to prove its happiness ; but there was a peculiar tenet which I made a point of supporting : for I maintained with Whiston, that it was unlawful for a priest of the Church of England, after the death of his first wife, to take a second, or, to express it in one word, I valued myself upon being a strict monogamist. I was early initiated into this important dispute, on which so many laborious volumes have been written. I published some tracts upon the subject myself, which, as they never sold, I have the consolation of thinking were read only by the happy jew. Some of my friends called this my weak side ; but alas ! they h...« less