st how to traffick with. And verily it looks
but sadly (although it oftentimes happens) when a Man and his Wife do
contend about this. Nevertheless some men, because they imagine to
have the best understanding, use herein a very hard way of discourse
with their wives, making it all their business to snap and snarl,
chide and bawl, nay threaten and strike also; which indeed rather mars
then mends the matter, little thinking that quietness in a family is
such a costly Jewell, that it seldom can be valued.

Others, on the contrary, take their greatest delight, when they know
how, with affableness to please their wives humour, and with plausible
words can admonish them what is best and fittest to be done; and
rather to extoll those graces which are found in them, than to reprove
their deficiencies: According to the instructions of the prudent
Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who said, that men ought often to admonish
their wives, seldom reprove them, and never strike them.

But many men whose understanding is turned topsie turvy in their
brains, seek it in a contrary place, and where the Bank is lowest,
the Water breaks in soonest. In such case the Women suffer cruelly.
For if he be foul-mouth'd, he is not ashamed openly before his
servants and other people to check, curb, and controul his wife
lustily; and when they are in private together, reprehends her so
bitterly, that he would not dare to mention it in the ears of honest
people: because having seen that his Border, out of meer civility, cut
many times the best peece at Table and presented to his Wife, bilds
thereupon a foundation of jealousie, and an undoubted familiarity,
which he privately twits her in the teeth with; though in publick he
is ashamed to let it appear that he is jealous; because then he would
be laught at for it; therefore he doth nothing but pout, mumble, bawl,
scold, is cross-grain'd and troubled at every thing; nay looks upon
his Wife and all the rest of his Family like a Welsh Goat, none of
them knowing the least reason in the World for it.

In the meanwhile he useth all possible means privately to attrap his
wife; for to see that which he never will see; and at which he is so
divellishly possessed to have a wicked revenge; nay which he also
never can see though he had a whole boxfull of spectacles upon his
nose; because she never hath, or ever will give him the least reason
for it. In that manner violating loves knot, and laying a foundation
of implac