of madmen; though they may present a mixture of the furious and the ridiculous, still they are to be treated with the greatest lenity and tenderness; and if, after all, you fail, the frailty is to be lamented as a misfortune, and not punished as a fault, seeing that it must have its foundation in a feeling towards you, which it would be the basest of ingratitude, and the most ferocious of cruelty, to repay by harshness of any description.

193.  As to those husbands who make the unjust suspicions of their wives a justification for making those suspicions just; as to such as can make a sport of such suspicions, rather brag of them than otherwise, and endeavour to aggravate rather than assuage them; as to such I have nothing to say, they being far without the scope of any advice that I can offer.  But to such as are not of this description, I have a remark or two to offer with respect to measures of prevention.

194.  And, first, I never could see the sense of its being a piece of etiquette, a sort of mark of good breeding, to make it a rule that man and wife are not to sit side by side in a mixed company; that if a party walk out, the wife is to give her arm to some other than her husband; that if there be any other hand near, his is not to help to a seat or into a carriage.  I never could see the sense of this; but I have always seen the nonsense of it plainly enough; it is, in short, amongst many other foolish and mischievous things that we do in aping the manners of those whose riches (frequently ill-gotten) and whose power embolden them to set, with impunity, pernicious examples; and to their examples this nation owes more of its degradation in morals than to any other source.  The truth is, that this is a piece of false refinement:  it, being interpreted, means, that so free are the parties from a liability to suspicion, so innately virtuous and pure are they, that each man can safely trust his wife with another man, and each woman her husband with another woman.  But this piece of false refinement, like all others, overshoots its mark; it says too much; for it says that the parties have lewd thoughts in their minds.  This is not the fact, with regard to people in general; but it must have been the origin of this set of consummately ridiculous and contemptible rules.

195.  Now I would advise a young man, especially if he have a pretty wife, not to commit her unnecessarily to the care of any other man; not to be separated from her in this studious and ceremonious manner; and not to be ashamed to prefer her company and conversation to that of any other woman.  I never could discover any good-breeding in setting another man, almost expressly, to poke his nose up in the face of my wife, and talk nonsense to her; for, in such cases, nonsense it generally is.  It is not a thing of much consequence, to be sure; but when the wife is young, especially,