CHAPTER CXVI.
DR. SOUTHEY. JOHN BUNYAN. BARTHOLOMÆUS SCHERÆUS. TERTULLIAN. DOMENICO BERNINO. PETRARCH. JEREMY TAYLOR. HARTLEY COLERIDGE. DIEGO DE SAN PEDRO, AND ADAM LITTLETON.
Black spirits and white, red spirits and gray;
Mingle, mingle, mingle, you that mingle may.
Titty, Tiffin, keep it stiff in!
Firedrake, Puckey, make it lucky!
Liard, Robin, you must bob in!
Round, around, around, about, about!
All good come running in, all ill keep out.
MIDDLETON.
Nine years after the convention of Cintra a representation was made to the Laureate in favour of some artillery horses employed in Sir Arthur Wellesley's army. They were cast-off Irish cavalry, and their efficiency had been called in question; indeed it had been affirmed that they were good for nothing; attestations to disprove this were produced, and the Laureate was requested to set this matter right in his History of the Peninsular War. The good-natured historian has given accordingly a note to the subject, saying that he thought himself bound to notice the representation were it only for the singularity of the case. If Dr. Southey thought it became him for that reason and for truth's sake, to speak a good word of some poor horses who had long ago been worked to death and left to the dogs and wolves by the way side, much more may I feel myself bound for the sake of Dr. Dove to vindicate the daughter of his old schoolmaster from a splenetic accusation brought against her by her husband. The reader who knows what the Doctor's feelings were with regard to Mr. Guy, and what mine are for the Doctor, would I am sure excuse me even if on such an occasion I had travelled out of the record.
Gent when he penned that peevish page seems to have thought with Tom Otter, that a wife is a very scurvy clogdogdo! And with John Bunyan that “Women, whenever they would perk it and lord it over their husbands, ought to remember that both by creation and transgression they are made to be in subjection to them.” “Such a thing,” says the Arch-tinker, “may happen, as that the woman, not the man, may be in the right, (I mean when both are godly) but ordinarily it is otherwise!”
Authors of a higher class than the York printer and topographist have complained of their wives. We read in Burton that Bartholomæus Scheræus, Professor of Hebrew at Wittenberg, whom he calls “that famous Poet Laureate,” said in the introduction to a work of his upon the Psalms, he should have finished it long before, but amongst many miseries which almost broke his back (his words were inter alia dura et tristia, quæ misero mihi pene tergum fregerunt,) he was yoked to a worse than Xantippe. A like lamentation is made more oddly and with less excuse, by Domenico Bernino, the author of a large history of All Heresies, which he dedicated to Clement XI. Tertullian, he says, being ill advised in his youth, and deceived by that shadow of repose which the conjugal state offers to the travellers in this miserable world, threw himself into the troubled sea of matrimony. And no sooner had he taken a wife, than being made wise by his own misfortunes, he composed his laborious treatise de molestiis nuptiarum, concerning the troubles of marriage, finding in this employment the only relief from those continual miseries, to which, he adds, we who now write may bear our present and too faithful testimony,—delle quali Noi ancora che queste cose scriviamo, siamo per lui testimonio pur troppo vero e presente.
The Historian of Heresy and the Hebrew Professor might have learnt a lesson from Petrarch's Dialogue de importunâ Uxore, in that work of his de Remediis Utriusque Fortunæ. When DOLOR complains of having a bad wife, RATIO reminds him that he might blame his ill fortune for any other calamity, but this he had brought upon himself and the only remedy was patience.
Est mala crux, conjux mala; crux tamen illa ferenda est
Quâ nemo nisi Mors te relevare potest.