by their mere constancy without care or artifice; every one repents, and gives himself the lie for what he has believed and said; and from girls a little suspected they have been afterward advanced to the first rank amongst the ladies of honour.  Somebody told Plato that all the world spoke ill of him.  “Let them talk,” said he; “I will live so as to make them change their note.”  Besides the fear of God, and the value of so rare a glory, which ought to make them look to themselves, the corruption of the age we live in compels them to it; and if I were they, there is nothing I would not rather do than intrust my reputation in so dangerous hands.  In my time the pleasure of telling (a pleasure little inferior to that of doing) was not permitted but to those who had some faithful and only friend; but now the ordinary discourse and common table-talk is nothing but boasts of favours received and the secret liberality of ladies.  In earnest, ’tis too abject, too much meanness of spirit, in men to suffer such ungrateful, indiscreet, and giddy-headed people so to persecute, forage, and rifle those tender and charming favours.

This our immoderate and illegitimate exasperation against this vice springs from the most vain and turbulent disease that afflicts human minds, which is jealousy: 

              “Quis vetat apposito lumen de lumine sumi? 
               Dent licet assidue, nil tamen inde perit;”

["Who says that one light should not be lighted from another light?  Let them give ever so much, as much ever remains to lose.”—­Ovid, De Arte Amandi, iii. 93.  The measure of the last line is not good; but the words are taken from the epigram in the Catalecta entitled Priapus.]

she, and envy, her sister, seem to me to be the most foolish of the whole troop.  As to the last, I can say little about it; ’tis a passion that, though said to be so mighty and powerful, had never to do with me.  As to the other, I know it by sight, and that’s all.  Beasts feel it; the shepherd Cratis, having fallen in love with a she-goat, the he-goat, out of jealousy, came, as he lay asleep, to butt the head of the female, and crushed it.  We have raised this fever to a greater excess by the examples of some barbarous nations; the best disciplined have been touched with it, and ’tis reason, but not transported: 

              “Ense maritali nemo confossus adulter
               Purpureo Stygias sanguine tinxit aquas.”

["Never did adulterer slain by a husband
stain with purple blood the Stygian waters.”]

Lucullus, Caesar, Pompey, Antony, Cato, and other brave men were cuckolds, and knew it, without making any bustle about it; there was in those days but one coxcomb, Lepidus, that died for grief that his wife had used him so.

              “Ah! tum te miserum malique fati,
               Quem attractis pedibus, patente porta,
               Percurrent raphanique mugilesque:”