"Fire! gallantry! chivalry!" cried my father, who had taken Riccabocca
under his special protection; "why, don't you see that the man
is described as a philosopher?--and I should like to know when a
philosopher ever plunged into matrimony without considerable misgivings
and cold shivers! Indeed, it seems that--perhaps before he was a
philosopher--Riccabocca had tried the experiment, and knew what it
was. Why, even that plain-speaking, sensible, practical man, Metellus
Numidicus, who was not even a philosopher, but only a Roman censor,
thus expressed himself in an exhortation to the people to perpetrate
matrimony: 'If, O Quirites, we could do without wives, we should all
dispense with that subject of care _ea molestia careremus;_ but since
nature has so managed it that we cannot live with women comfortably, nor
without them at all, let us rather provide for the human race than our
own temporary felicity.'"

Here the ladies set up such a cry of indignation, that both Roland and
myself endeavoured to appease their wrath by hasty assurances that we
utterly repudiated the damnable doctrine of Metellus Numidicus.

My father, wholly unmoved, as soon as a sullen silence was established,
recommenced. "Do not think, ladies," said he, "that you were without
advocates at that day: there were many Romans gallant enough to blame
the censor for a mode of expressing himself which they held to be
equally impolite and injudicious. 'Surely,' said they, with some
plausibility, if Numidicus wished men to marry, he need not have
referred so peremptorily to the disquietudes of the connection, and thus
have made them more inclined to turn away from matrimony than give them
a relish for it.' But against these critics one honest man (whose name
of Titus Castricius should not be forgotten by posterity) maintained
that Metellus Numidicus could not have spoken more properly; 'For
remark,' said he, 'that Metellus was a censor, not a rhetorician. It
becomes rhetoricians to adorn and disguise and make the best of things;
but Metellus, sanctus vir,--a holy and blameless man, grave and sincere
to wit, and addressing the Roman people in the solemn capacity of
Censor,--was bound to speak the plain truth, especially as he was
treating of a subject on which the observation of every day, and the
experience of every life, could not leave the least doubt upon the mind
of his audience.' Still, Riccabocca, having decided to marry, has no
doubt prepared hims