Sylv. But which way then must the lover come?
L. Dunce. Nay, I'll betray Beaugard to him, show him the picture he sent me, and beg of him, as he tenders his own honour and my quiet, to take some course to secure me from the scandalous solicitations of that innocent fellow.
Sylv. And so make him the property, the go-between, to bring the affair to an issue the more decently.
L. Dunce. Right, Sylvia; 'tis the best office a husband can do a wife; I mean an old husband. Bless us, to be yoked in wedlock with a paralytic, coughing, decrepit dotterel; to be a dry-nurse all one's life-time to an old child of sixty-five; to lie by the image of death a whole night, a dull immoveable, that has no sense of life but through its pains! the pigeon's as happy that's laid to a sick man's feet, when the world has given him over:[34] for my part, this shall henceforth be my prayer:—
Curst be the memory, nay double curst,
Of her that wedded age for interest first!
Though worn with years, with fruitless wishes full,
'Tis all day troublesome, and all night dull.
Who wed with fools, indeed, lead happy lives;
Fools are the fittest, finest things for wives:
Yet old men profit bring, as fools bring ease,
And both make youth and wit much better please. [Exeunt.
FOOTNOTES:
[26] Knights of the post were hired witnesses and men of straw who made a trade of becoming bail. They hung about the various inns of court so as to be available at a moment's notice. In Hudibras we read:
"Retain all sorts of witnesses
That ply i' the Temples under trees,
Or walk the Round with Knights o' th' Posts
About the crossed-legged Knights their hosts."
[27] In Covent Garden.