Note 1394 — Chapter X · RISE OF CIVIL MARRIAGE
Reading edition
Fox (Cobbett, loc. cit., 73) deprecates "making so free with the laws of God and nature." See also Nugent (ibid., 12-14) and Beckford (ibid., 82, 83). On the other side, the Earl of Hillsborough asks whether even the "vulgar can believe, that there is anything sacred in a ceremony performed in a little room of an ale-house in the Fleet, and by a profligate clergyman whom they see all in rags, swearing like a trooper and higgling about what he is to have for his trouble, and half drunk at the very time he is performing the ceremony."