all this finery
was often done on a Sunday, and there is a great deal of harm in
doing right things at a wrong time, or in wasting much time on
things which are of no real use, or in doing any thing at all out
of vanity. Now I beg that no lazy slattern of a wife will go and
take any comfort in her dirt from what is here said against
Rebecca's nicety; for I believe, that for one who makes her husband
unhappy through neatness, twenty do so by dirt and laziness. All
excuses are wrong, but the excess of a good quality is not so
uncommon as the excess of a bad one; and not being so obvious,
perhaps, for that very reason requires more animadversion.

John Wilmot was not an ill-natured man, but he had no fixed
principle. Instead of setting himself to cure his wife's faults by
mild reproof and good example, he was driven by them into still
greater faults himself. It is a common case with people who have no
religion, when any cross accident befalls them, instead of trying to
make the best of a bad matter, instead of considering their trouble
as a trial sent from God to purify them, or instead of considering
the faults of others as a punishment for their own sins, instead of
this I say, what do they do, but either sink down at once into
despair, or else run for comfort into evil courses. Drinking is the
common remedy for sorrow, if that can be called a remedy, the end of
which is to destroy soul and body. John now began to spend all his
leisure hours at the Bell. He used to be fond of his children: but
when he could not come home in quiet, and play with the little ones,
while his wife dressed him a bit of hot supper, he grew in time not
to come home at all. He who has once taken to drink can seldom be
said to be guilty of one sin only; John's heart became hardened. His
affection for his family was lost in self-indulgence. Patience and
submission on the part of the wife, might have won much upon a man
of John's temper; but instead of trying to reclaim him, his wife
seemed rather to delight in putting him as much in the wrong as she
could, that she might be justified in her constant abuse of him. I
doubt whether she would have been as much pleased with his
reformation as she was with always talking of his faults, though I
know it was the opinion of the neighbors, that if she had taken as
much pains to reform her husband by reforming her own temper, as she
did to abuse him and expose him, her endeavors might have been
blessed wit