On the Choice of a Wife.
Enough of beauty to secure affection,
Enough of sprightliness to shun dejection,
Of modest diffidence to claim protection;
A docile mind subservient to correction,
Yet stored with sense, with reason, and reflection,
And every passion held in due subjection;
Just faults enough to keep her from perfection.
When such I find, I’ll make her my election.
Henry IV.
On the night of the twentieth of January, 1608, the historian Pierre Mathieu relates, that he was present at the levee of Henry IV. of France, when that monarch said, that such had been the intense frost on that night, “his whiskers had been frozen when in bed by the side of the queen.”