, as
discovered how nearly she was concerned in the distress.

When I observed she had done speaking, "Madam," said I, "the affliction
you mention is the greatest that can happen in human life, and I know
but one consolation in it, if that be a consolation, that the calamity
is a pretty general one. There is nothing so common as for men to enter
into marriage, without so much as expecting to be happy in it. They seem
to propose to themselves a few holidays in the beginning of it; after
which they are to return at best to the usual course of their life; and
for aught they know, to constant misery and uneasiness. From this false
sense of the state they are going into, proceeds the immediate coldness
and indifference, or hatred and aversion, which attend ordinary
marriages, or rather bargains to cohabit." Our conversation was here
interrupted by company which came in upon us.

The humour of affecting a superior carriage, generally rises from a
false notion of the weakness of a female understanding in general, or an
overweening opinion that we have of our own: for when it proceeds from a
natural ruggedness and brutality of temper, it is altogether
incorrigible, and not to be amended by admonition. Sir Francis Bacon, as
I remember, lays it down as a maxim, that no marriage can be happy in
which the wife has no opinion of her husband's wisdom;[165] but without
offence to so great an authority, I may venture to say, that a
sullen-wise man is as bad as a good-natured fool. Knowledge, softened
with complacency and good breeding, will make a man equally beloved and
respected; but when joined with a severe, distant and unsociable temper,
it creates rather fear than love. I who am a bachelor, have no other
notion of conjugal tenderness, but what I learn from books, and shall
therefore produce three letters of Pliny,[166] who was not only one of
the greatest, but the most learned men in the whole Roman Empire. At the
same time I am very much ashamed, that on such occasions I am obliged to
have recourse to heathen authors, and shall appeal to my readers, if
they would not think it a mark of a narrow education in a man of quality
to write such passionate letters to any woman but a mistress. They were
all three written at a time when she was at a distance from him: the
first of them puts me in mind of a married friend of mine, who said,
sickness itself is pleasant to a man that is attended in it by one whom
he dearly loves.

_Plin