But such things are rare. Usually the laugh is on the other side. As the Frenchman wrote:
‘While Adam slept, Eve from his side arose:
Strange! his first sleep should be his last repose!’
Everybody knows the epitaph which Dryden intended for his wife; and side by side with it may be placed the lines by an anonymous author:
‘God has to me sufficiently been kind,
To take my wife, and leave me here behind.’
So again:
‘Brutus unmoved heard how his Portia fell;
Should Jack’s wife die, he would behave as well.’
The story of the man who, at his spouse’s funeral, deprecated hurry, on the ground that one should not make a toil of a pleasure, need only be alluded to.
The chief charge against the wives is that they will insist upon being the heads of the households. That is the refrain of many a flout hurled against them. To marry—such is the moral of some lines by Samuel Bishop—is to lose your liberty. The lady will have everything her way:
‘For ne’er heard I of woman, good or ill,
But always lovèd best her own sweet will.’
So says a seventeenth-century writer; and the complaint is general.