173.  If you have servants, they know to a moment the time of your absence; and they regulate their proceedings accordingly.  ’Like master like man,’ is an old and true proverb; and it is natural, if not just, that it should be thus; for it would be unjust if the careless and neglectful sot were served as faithfully as the vigilant, attentive and sober man.  Late hours, cards and dice, are amongst the consequences of the master’s absence; and why not, seeing that he is setting the example?  Fire, candle, profligate visitants, expences, losses, children ruined in habits and morals, and, in short, a train of evils hardly to be enumerated, arise from this most vicious habit of the master spending his leisure time from home.  But beyond all the rest is the ill-treatment of the wife.  When left to ourselves we all seek the company that we like best; the company in which we take the most delight:  and therefore every husband, be his state of life what it may, who spends his leisure time, or who, at least, is in the habit of doing it, in company other than that of his wife and family, tells her and them, as plainly by deeds as he could possibly do by words, that he takes more delight in other company than in theirs.  Children repay this with disregard for their father; but to a wife of any sensibility, it is either a dagger to her heart or an incitement to revenge, and revenge, too, of a species which a young woman will seldom be long in want of the means to gratify.  In conclusion of these remarks respecting absentee husbands, I would recommend all those who are prone to, or likely to fall into, the practice, to remember the words of Mrs. SULLEN, in the BEAUX’ STRATAGEM:  ‘My husband,’ says she, addressing a footman whom she had taken as a paramour, ’comes reeling home at midnight, tumbles in beside me as a salmon flounces in a net, oversets the economy of my bed, belches the fumes of his drink in my face, then twists himself round, leaving me half naked, and listening till morning to that tuneful nightingale, his nose.’  It is at least forty-three years since I read the BEAUX’ STRATAGEM, and I now quote from memory; but the passage has always occurred to me whenever I have seen a sottish husband; and though that species of revenge, for the taking of which the lady made this apology, was carrying the thing too far, yet I am ready to confess, that if I had to sit in judgment on her for taking even this revenge, my sentence would be very lenient; for what right has such a husband to expect fidelity?  He has broken his vow; and by what rule of right has she to be bound to hers?  She thought that she was marrying a man; and she finds that she was married to a beast.  He has, indeed, committed no offence that the law of the land can reach; but he has violated the vow by which he obtained possession of her person; and, in the eye of justice, the compact between them is dissolved.