["Serve thy husband as thy master, but guard thyself against him as
     from a traitor.”]

which is to say, comport thyself towards him with a dissembled, inimical, and distrustful reverence (a cry of war and defiance), is equally injurious and hard.  I am too mild for such rugged designs:  to say the truth, I am not arrived to that perfection of ability and refinement of wit, to confound reason with injustice, and to laugh at all rule and order that does not please my palate; because I hate superstition, I do not presently run into the contrary extreme of irreligion.

     (If a man hate superstition he cannot love religion.  D.W.)

If a man does not always perform his duty, he ought at least to love and acknowledge it; ’tis treachery to marry without espousing.

Let us proceed.

Our poet represents a marriage happy in a good accord wherein nevertheless there is not much loyalty.  Does he mean, that it is not impossible but a woman may give the reins to her own passion, and yield to the importunities of love, and yet reserve some duty toward marriage, and that it may be hurt, without being totally broken?  A serving man may cheat his master, whom nevertheless he does not hate.  Beauty, opportunity, and destiny (for destiny has also a hand in’t),

                         “Fatum est in partibus illis
          Quas sinus abscondit; nam, si tibi sidera cessent,
          Nil faciet longi mensura incognita nervi;”

     ["There is a fatality about the hidden parts:  let nature have
     endowed you however liberally, ’tis of no use, if your good star
     fails you in the nick of time.”—­Juvenal, ix. 32.]

have attached her to a stranger; though not so wholly, peradventure, but that she may have some remains of kindness for her husband.  They are two designs, that have several paths leading to them, without being confounded with one another; a woman may yield to a man she would by no means have married, not only for the condition of his fortune, but for those also of his person.  Few men have made a wife of a mistress, who have not repented it.  And even in the other world, what an unhappy life does Jupiter lead with his, whom he had first enjoyed as a mistress!  ’Tis, as the proverb runs, to befoul a basket and then put it upon one’s head.  I have in my time, in a good family, seen love shamefully and dishonestly cured by marriage:  the considerations are widely different.  We love at once, without any tie, two things contrary in themselves.

Socrates was wont to say, that the city of Athens pleased, as ladies do whom men court for love; every one loved to come thither to take a turn, and pass away his time; but no one liked it so well as to espouse it, that is, to inhabit there, and to make it his constant residence.  I have been vexed to see husbands hate their wives only because they themselves do them wrong; we should not, at all events, methinks, love them the less for our own faults; they should at least, upon the account of repentance and compassion, be dearer to us.